Kinship and Evolved Psychological Dispositions: The Mother’s Brother Controversy

Reconsidered
Author(s): Maurice Bloch and Dan Sperber
Source: Current Anthropology, Vol. 43, No. 5 (December 2002), pp. 723-748
Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of Wenner-Gren Foundation for
Anthropological Research
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C u r r e n t A n t h r o p o l o g y Volume 43, Number 5, December 2002
䉷 2002 by The Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. All rights reserved 0011-3204/2002/4305-0002$3.00
Kinship and Evolved
Psychological
Dispositions
The Mother’s Brother
Controversy Reconsidered1
by Maurice Bloch and Dan Sperber
This article revisits the old controversy concerning the relation
of the mother’s brother and sister’s son in patrilineal societies in
the light both of anthropological criticisms of the very notion of
kinship and of evolutionary and epidemiological approaches to
culture. It argues that the ritualized patterns of behavior dis-
cussed by Radcliffe-Brown, Goody, and others are to be explained
in terms of the interaction of a variety of factors, some local and
historical, others pertaining to general human dispositions. In
particular, an evolved disposition to favor relatives can contrib-
ute to the development and stabilization of these behaviors not
by directly generating them but by making them particularly
“catchy” and resilient. In this way, it is possible to recognize
both that cultural representations and practices are specific to a
community at a time in its history (rather than mere tokens of a
general type) and that they are, in essential respects, grounded in
the common evolved psychology of human beings.
m a u r i c e b l o c h is Professor of Anthropology at the London
School of Economics and Political Science (Houghton St., London
WC2A 2AE, U.K. [m.e.bloch@lse.ac.uk]). Born in 1939, he was
educated at the University of London (B.A., 1962) and at Cam-
bridge University (Ph.D., 1968). His publications include From
Blessing to Violence: History and Ideology in the Circumcision
Ritual of the Merina of Madagascar (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 1986), Prey into Hunter: The Politics of Religious
Experience (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), and
How We Think They Think: Anthropology and Approaches to
Cognition, Memory, and Literacy (Boulder: Westview Press,
1998).
d a n s p e r b e r is Director of Research at the Centre National
de Recherches Scientifiques, Paris. He was born in 1942 and edu-
cated at the Sorbonne (Licence ès Lettres, 1962) and at Oxford
University (B.Litt., 1968). Among his publications are Rethinking
Symbolism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), On
Anthropological Knowledge (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1985), and Explaining Culture: A Naturalistic Approach
(Oxford: Blackwell, 1996).
The present paper was submitted 31 i 01 and accepted 25 x 01.
1. For Jack Goody.
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One of the most discussed topics in the history of an-
thropology has been the significance of the relationship
between mother’s brother and sister’s son in patrilineal
societies. However, the subject seems to have entirely
faded from the hot topics of the discipline since the six-
ties. We believe that, in reviewing this academic story
of strange excitement and then total neglect, we can both
understand some of the fundamental epistemological
problems of anthropology and suggest some of the ways
in which new approaches might throw light on questions
which have tended to be abandoned rather than resolved.
The History of the Mother’s Brother
Controversy
The behavior which so intrigued anthropologists in-
volved the rights, recognized in many unrelated patri-
lineal societies, of a male member of the junior gener-
ation over the property and even the persons and wives
of senior male members of his mother’s lineage, typically
the mother’s brother.2 The example which came to be
most discussed was that of the BaThonga of Southern
Africa because of the particularly full and surprising de-
scription of the customs involved given by the early mis-
sionary ethnographer Henri Junod in 1912. There the
relation primarily concerned the right of mutual insult
between the sister’s son and the mother’s brother and
his wives and unclear claims to the property of the
mother’s brother by the sister’s son. The tolerated vio-
lence of the behavior, as well as its sexual overtones,
contributed to the fascination with the custom and prob-
ably titillated the various scholars who discussed the
subject. But it was not so much this one example which
interested scholars as the conviction that they were deal-
ing with a peculiar relationship which occurred again
and again in many totally unrelated societies, something
which was all the more unexpected in that it contra-
dicted patrilineal organizational principles—since
mother’s brothers and sister’s sons must usually belong
to different lineages—and the respect usually accorded
to senior generations.
Examples of this peculiar relationship were thought to
have been found among Australian Aborigines and in
Amazonia, southern Europe, Oceania, and India, not to
mention other parts of Africa. Even today recent eth-
nographers have been struck, again and again, by the
prominence accorded to this relationship by the people
they have studied in many different places, for example,
northern India (Jamous 1991), Amazonia (Viveiros de
Castro 1992), and Melanesia (Gillison 1993). But this ap-
parent recurrence itself raises a problem. The various
manifestations which so many anthropologists have rec-
ognized as instances of the peculiar mother’s brother/
sister’s son relationship are clearly cognate. At the same
time, these cases turn out, on closer examination, to be
very varied—sometimes involving symmetrical joking,
2. In a way that is typical of the time, the focus was almost exclu-
sively on male roles.
723
724 F c u r r e n t a n t h ro p o l o g y Volume 43, Number 5, December 2002
sometimes asymmetrical joking, sometimes avoidance,
sometimes significant economic privileges, sometimes
sexual rights, sometimes only ritual manifesta-
tions—and, furthermore, while in some cases it is actual
mother’s brothers and sister’s sons who have the rights
in question, the relation sometimes involves broad clas-
sificatory groups. The variation is in fact so great that it
becomes very difficult to say exactly what it is that the
various examples share, and this inevitably has made
many wonder whether the scholars who have turned
their attention to the question have not been dealing
with a nonexistent category.
At first, anthropologists assuming a universal history
for humankind along a single evolutionary path and, im-
plicitly, a universal cognitive representation of filiation
and marriage saw in such practices as the aggressive
claim of the sister’s son to his mother’s brother’s prop-
erty a survival of mother right and proof of the existence
of an earlier matrilineal stage (Rivers 1924). This expla-
nation was then famously dismissed by Radcliffe-Brown
(1924), who, using his refutation to demonstrate the char-
acter of structural-functional accounts, supplied a syn-
chronic explanation for the practice. Thus the contro-
versy over the mother’s brother could not have been
more central to the short history of social anthropolog-
ical theory, and the success of Radcliffe-Brown’s argu-
ment was a key element in the gradual marginalization
of notions of evolution from the mainstream of the
discipline.
Radcliffe-Brown’s explanation was, at first, mainly in
terms of the extension of sentiment. He argued that the
sentiments of a child toward its mother were extended
to the mother’s family, making the mother’s brother a
kind of male mother who acted accordingly in a maternal
fashion and so gave gifts to his sister’s son. More im-
portant, however, was the argument that such customs
could only be understood in terms of their function as
part of the total social structure. Radcliffe-Brown’s ar-
gument therefore not only went against evolutionism
but also was to be a dramatic demonstration of the value
of what has come to be known as structural-function-
alism. For Radcliffe-Brown, therefore, the idea of an iden-
tical and single history of humankind was to be aban-
doned, but a universalistic element remained in that he
assumed a universal cognitive basis for the representa-
tion of kinship; mothers were always mothers, and pat-
riliny’s attempt to underplay this caused problems which
had to be resolved by strange customs. Furthermore, be-
cause of the commonality of the fundamental building
blocks of kinship systems, large-scale comparisons could
be made between societies, which were to be the foun-
dations of the new “natural science of society.”
In turn, Radcliffe-Brown was criticized by Fortes (1953)
and then by Goody (1959), who, while retaining the fun-
damental principle of a synchronic explanation in terms
of a systematic social structure, criticized Radcliffe-
Brown’s explanation for being overgeneral, since it would
predict a much greater degree of universality and uni-
formity than the evidence warranted. Goody’s criticism
took the form of noting that, although the sentiments
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of children toward their mothers were everywhere the
same, the specific practice in question was found only
in certain societies that had patrilineal descent groups
without the counterbalance of matrilineal inheritance
and that any explanation had to be tied to the occurrence
of this type of group. Furthermore, and here following
the later Radcliffe-Brown, he specified the character of
the institution much more narrowly than the earlier ev-
olutionist writers, insisting on the element of privileged
aggression in the snatching of property by the sister’s
son in ritual contexts. This strange custom he explained
as did Fortes, in terms of the contradiction between what
he argued was a universally bilateral kinship system and
the occasionally occurring unilineal descent system. He
argued that sister’s sons were grandchildren of their
mother’s fathers in the kinship system and therefore
their heirs, while in the descent system they were in no
way their successors, since descent was traced only in
the patrilineal line. The tolerated snatching of meat by
the sister’s son at his mother’s brother’s sacrifices re-
solved this contradiction because in this way he recov-
ered some of his grandparental inheritance from the son
of his maternal grandparents, who had (abusively in
terms of the kinship system but legitimately in terms
of the descent system) received all of that inheritance.
Goody clinched this argument with a comparison of two
closely related groups with different property systems in
which the degree of inheritance “deprivation” of the sis-
ter’s son was correlated with the importance of meat
snatching.
This piece of work is a particularly fine example of
the structural-functional analyses of its time. It assumes,
with a characteristically confident tone, that comparison
of the social structures of different societies will reveal
recurring connections between different features which,
it can then be assumed, are related in a synchronic causal
way. This sort of comparison also implies a belief that
the basic institutions of societies are everywhere of
much the same kind, that they are represented in much
the same way, and that we know that all human societies
have men and women, marriage, and filiation. According
to this way of thinking, patriliny is a particular perspec-
tive imposed on the universally recognized facts of pro-
creation. The belief in the universality of the basic rep-
resentations of kinship of Radcliffe-Brown is thus
modified but not abandoned, since these representations,
when they occur, are about natural, objective facts that
exist independently. Furthermore, the emotional reac-
tion to a certain state of affairs, in this case ambiguity
over filiation, is assumed to be basically the same for all
humans irrespective of culture and to produce, therefore,
similar behaviors in similar circumstances. These dif-
ferent but related assumptions of a common ground are
what made the use of comparison as a discovery proce-
dure possible. Variations were significant because it
could be assumed that they occurred within the same
natural field consisting of identifiable elements; thus the
general principles of Radcliffe-Brown’s natural compar-
ative science of society remained possible.
This identity of the basic building blocks of kinship
 b l o c h a n d s p e r b e r Kinship and Evolved Psychological Dispositions F 725
systems is precisely what came under challenge in the
subsequent development of the discipline. The first
clearly expressed formulation of the coming epistemo-
logical shift is to be found in Leach’s 1955 paper on mar-
riage, and this shift was emphatically repeated and ex-
panded in Needham’s introduction to Rethinking
Kinship and Marriage (1971). The basis of their argu-
ments was that marriage and kinship, as understood by
social and cultural anthropologists, were not externally
existing phenomena but merely glosses for loosely sim-
ilar notions found in different cultures. As Needham put
it, there was no such thing as kinship. Subsequently, in
a more empirical mood, Schneider (1984) attempted to
demonstrate that Austronesian kinship was a funda-
mentally different phenomenon from European kinship
and therefore aiming at understanding the former with
the words appropriate for the latter was a source of con-
fusion. Thus, generalizing comparisons of kinship sys-
tems were impossible because they did not, as was pre-
viously assumed, involve comparisons of like with like.
Similar in inspiration but even more startling—though
to many less convincing in its extreme forms—was the
point made by a number of feminists that there were no
such things as women and men beyond a specific cul-
tural context. Explicitly drawing on Schneider’s critique
of kinship, Collier and Yanagisako (1987) argued that the
differentiation between female and male that anthro-
pologists had incorporated into their analyses was a “cul-
tural construction” and of a quite different order from
any sexual difference between organisms that might ex-
ist in nature. These anti-naı̈ve-empiricist points had two
consequences for the kind of argument that Radcliffe-
Brown, Fortes, and Goody had presented. First of all, as
was noted above, it could be argued that the grand com-
parisons of structural-functionalism involved operations
like adding apples and pears, and, secondly, the social
units, for example, lineages, were not similar “natural
things” occurring in different societies but different and
unique historical/cultural representations constructed in
different settings and therefore incommensurable (see
Kuper 1982). The only reason, according to these writers,
that kinship had seemed so similar among different hu-
man groups across the globe was an ethnocentric ten-
dency to see similarities and overlook differences. Fi-
nally, the last universalistic element in the Goody
argument, the similarity of behavioral response in all
humans to similar situations, also came under attack by
anthropologists who claimed that emotions too were cul-
turally constructed (Rosaldo 1980) and could therefore
not be intuited from introspective sympathy.
The implication of all this for the type of comparative
enterprise that Goody and others had been engaged in
seemed clear: it made it impossible. It led, if not nec-
essarily at least quite directly, to the deep relativism of
much modern anthropology. The systematic comparison
which for the structural-functionalists was to be a first
step toward scientific generalizations became clearly il-
legitimate if there could be no assurance that the units
of analyses were commensurate. Those who studied kin-
ship had deluded themselves that they had been dealing
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with biological facts, which it would be reasonable to
assume would be severely constrained by nature and
therefore comparable, while in reality they had been
dealing with representations which, it was implicitly as-
sumed, were the product of unique histories and there-
fore could take any form at all. In the case of the par-
ticular example of the mother’s brother controversy, the
recurrence of the institution which had intrigued the
earlier writers was a mirage. Every case was different,
and the very terms of the relationship—mother, brother,
sister, and son—did not indicate the same kind of thing
in different cultural contexts. Thus, just as structural-
functionalism had dealt the first blow to anthropology
as a natural science, the culturalist attack on structural-
functionalism seemed to have destroyed any hope of gen-
eralization. We had been left with nothing but anecdotes
about the infinity of specific situations in which human
beings find themselves.
The theoretical history we have just traced can be seen
as unidirectional; it is the history of the gradual aban-
donment of belief in the possibility of anthropology as
a generalizing science. It assumes that because human
beings can transmit information between individuals
through symbolic communication they are entirely free
of any natural constraints and essentially different from
other animals, who transmit most, if not all, information
genetically. Animals must wait for changes in their ge-
nomes to become different; humans, in contrast, change
with their representations. The existence of these rep-
resentations is made possible by the learning and com-
putational potential of the human brain, but their con-
tents, it is implicitly assumed, are not at all constrained
or even influenced by genetically inherited brain “hard-
ware.” These contents are determined, rather, by his-
torico-cultural processes. Human history is therefore lib-
erated from biology, and people may represent the world
and each other as they please. The belief in the need for
cross-cultural regularities resisting historical specificity
becomes simply wrong, the product of a category mis-
take. The extension of the aims of natural science to the
study of culture and society would be like studying
smells with rulers.
The aim of this paper is not to deny the validity of at
least some of the criticisms of earlier anthropological
approaches which have just been touched on. Indeed, we
recognize the relevance of those arguments, and there is
no doubt that the whole enterprise of Radcliffe-Brownian
structural-functional analysis rested in part on the du-
bious foundations of misplaced naı̈ve realism. We agree
with Leach, Needham, and Schneider that the phenom-
ena described by anthropologists under the label of “kin-
ship” are cultural and therefore historical constructions
and that people’s thoughts and actions are about these
constructions rather than about unmediated facts of bi-
ological kinship. The implicit argument which would
see representations of kinship, marriage, and gender as
merely the inevitable recognition of “the way things are”
will not do. We will argue, however, that this does not
mean that the attempt to invoke natural factors or even
biological factors as explanations of such cultural rep-
726 F c u r r e n t a n t h ro p o l o g y Volume 43, Number 5, December 2002
resentations must be abandoned as though these repre-
sentations and the people who hold them had somehow
floated free from the earth into the immaterial clouds of
history. Antirealism too can be utterly naı̈ve.
We choose the example of the mother’s brother/sister’s
son relationship in patrilineal societies to demonstrate
our argument simply because it has been so critical in
the history of the discipline, and we try to show that it
is possible to envisage, in a case such as this, an approach
which combines the particular with the general, al-
though we must recognize that the actual carrying out
of such a study lies beyond what we can do here.
The abandonment of overpowerful theories in anthro-
pology came, in the first place, from the realization that
the implicit and explicit cultural “universals” of tradi-
tional anthropology were not as uniform as they had
been assumed to be. But anthropologists who argue for
a radically relativistic constructivism often seem to lack
confidence in their own arguments. Their reasoning has
taken them to a point that negates what all those with
a reasonable acquaintance with the ethnographic record
know—which is that the regularities which have fasci-
nated the discipline since its inception are surprisingly
evident. Thus, it is common for younger anthropologists,
reared on the diet of relativism which the studies men-
tioned above exemplify, to be shocked by discovering the
old chestnuts of traditional anthropology in their field-
work just when they had been convinced that these were
merely antique illusions.3
The dilemma that this particular history reveals is, in
fact, typical of the subject matter of anthropology as a
whole. What happens is that, first of all, some cross-
cultural regularities are recognized: the incest taboo, for
example. These lead to quick explanations in terms of
the evolution of culture and their “function” for society
as a whole, for individual well-being, or for reproductive
success. These explanations are then shown to be based
on a gross exaggeration of the unity of the phenomena
to be explained. Then explanation is abandoned alto-
gether and declared impossible, leaving anthropologists
and, even more, the wider public with the feeling that
the original question has been more evaded than faced.
In this way the very idea of the possibility of anthro-
pology is destroyed.
The Epidemiological Approach to
Representations
The aim of this paper is to shun such evasion and to
sketch a theoretical model applied to a particular
case—in other words, to see how a possible explanation
might be framed in the case of a particular example of
3. Maurice Bloch remembers how, as a student, he was bored with
the mother’s brother controversy and convinced that it was an in-
significant aberration in the history of the subject but subsequently,
during fieldwork in Madagascar, had to listen all night to a drunk
endlessly repeating, “I am your sister’s son, and it is your duty to
give me a drink.” He then felt haunted by Radcliffe-Brown.
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one of these “obvious” regularities, the varied but similar
peculiar relationships of the mother’s brother and the
sister’s son in different societies. We want to do this
without either exaggerating the unity of the phenome-
non or avoiding the problems discussed above concern-
ing misplaced realism, which recent theoretical criticism
has well illuminated.
What is involved in explaining a cultural phenome-
non? Here is a way of framing the question. All members
of a human community are linked to one another across
time and space by a flow of information. The information
is about themselves, their environment, their past, their
beliefs, their desires and fears, their skills and practices.
The flow has rapid and slow currents, narrow rivulets
and large streams, confluence and divisions. All the in-
formation in this flow is subject to distortion and decay.
Most of it is about some here-and-now situation and does
not flow much beyond it. Still, some of it is more stable
in content and more widely distributed, being shared by
many or even most members of the community. When
anthropologists talk of culture, they refer to this widely
shared information.
What explains the existence and contents of culture
in the social flow of information? An answer of a sort is
provided by modern interpretive anthropology, which
aims to show that the elements of a culture (or of a
cultural subsystem) cohere and constitute an integrated
worldview (see in particular Geertz 1973). This is not
the approach we favor. Without denying the insightful-
ness of such interpretive scholarship and the relative sys-
tematicity of culture, we are among those who have ar-
gued that this systematicity is often much greater in the
anthropologists’ interpretation than in the culture itself
(e.g., Leach 1954, Bloch 1977, Sperber 1985a) and there-
fore is exaggerated (as is acknowledged by James Boon
[1982:3–26], who speaks approvingly of the “exaggeration
of cultures”). More important, even if cultures were as
systematic as claimed, this would fall far short of ex-
plaining the spread and stability of these coherent
wholes, unless one were to take as given that there are
factors and mechanisms in the flow of information that
somehow promote systematicity. Rather than assuming
their existence, we favor studying the factors and mech-
anisms actually at work in the spread and stabilization
of cultural phenomena and leaving as an open question
the degree and manner in which they may indeed pro-
mote systematicity.
Our explanatory approach to this flow of information
in society is that of the “epidemiology of representa-
tions” (Sperber 1985b, 1996). It is naturalistic—that is,
it aims at describing and explaining cultural phenomena
in terms of processes and mechanisms the causal powers
of which are wholly grounded in their natural (or “ma-
terial”) properties. More specifically, the kind of natu-
ralistic explanation of cultural phenomena we favor in-
vokes two kinds of small-scale processes: psychological
processes within individuals and physical, biological,
and psycho-physical interactions between individuals
and their immediate environment (including interac-
tions with other individuals) that we call “ecological”
 b l o c h a n d s p e r b e r Kinship and Evolved Psychological Dispositions F 727
processes. Typically, the scale of the processes invoked
is much smaller than that of the cultural phenomena
described and explained in terms of them. It is the ar-
ticulation of large numbers of these microprocesses that
allows one to redescribe and explain cultural macro-
phenomena. This contrasts with more standard social
science accounts that explain cultural macrophenomena
in terms of other social and cultural macrophenomena.4
We view, then, the flow of information as a natural
process occurring in the form of causal chains of mi-
croevents that take place both in individual mind/brains
and in the shared environment of the individuals in-
volved. Inside minds, we are dealing with processes of
perception, inference, remembering, decision, and action
planning and with the mental representations (memo-
ries, beliefs, desires, plans) that these processes deploy.
In the environment, we are dealing with a variety of
behaviors often involving artifacts and in particular with
the production and reception of public representations
that can take the form of behaviors such as gestures or
utterances or of artifacts such as writings. We call these
representations “public” because, unlike mental repre-
sentations, they occur not within brains but in the shared
environment of several persons. Thus not just discourse
addressed to a crowd but also words whispered in some-
one’s ear are “public” in the intended sense. Mental
events cause public events, which in turn cause mental
events, and these chains of alternating mind-internal and
mind-external events carry information from individual
to individual. A simple example is provided by a folktale,
in which the main mental events are those of compre-
hension, remembering, recall, and speech planning and
the main public events are tellings of the tale. What
makes a particular story a folktale is the fact that re-
peated sequences of these mental and public events suc-
ceed in distributing a stable story across a population
over time.
All these events taking place inside and outside in-
dividual minds are material events: changes in brain
states, on the one hand, and changes in the immediate
environment of individuals, on the other. As material
events, they possess causal powers and can be invoked
as causes and effects in naturalistic causal explanations.
They differ in this respect from the abstract meanings
invoked in interpretive explanation (see Sperber 1985a:
chap. 1). That meanings can be causes is contentious,
and what kind of causal power they might have, if any,
is obscure (see Jacob 1997). For instance, attributing to
a folktale a meaning that coheres with, say, basic values
of the culture in which it is told may, in a way, “make
sense” of the tale, but it does not come near explaining
its distribution and hence its existence as a folktale in
that particular culture.
It could be objected that the microevents invoked in
an epidemiological approach are at the level of individual
4. Of course, explaining cultural phenomena in terms of micro-
interactions is not new in anthropology. The work of Fredrik Barth
(e.g., 1975, 1987), for example, has been a source of inspiration to
the epidemiological approach.
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minds and behaviors. How, then, can their study help
explain cultural macrophenomena that exist not on an
individual but on a societal scale? We have already sug-
gested that these macrocultural phenomena are made up,
at a microscopic level, of these causally linked micro-
events. To this it is sometimes objected that the vast
majority of these microevents cannot be observed: an-
thropologists will never witness more than a very small
sample of the public microevents involved, and mental
events cannot be observed at all. Here, however, the com-
parison with medical epidemiology should help dispose
of this objection.
Epidemiological phenomena such as epidemics are
macrophenomena occurring at the level of populations,
but they are made up of microphenomena of individual
pathology and interindividual transmission. In most
cases individual pathological processes are not directly
observable and are known only through symptoms and
tests, while the vast majority of microevents of disease
transmission go unobserved. This, however, has been a
challenge rather than an impediment to the development
of medical epidemiology. In the epidemiology of repre-
sentations the situation is, if anything, better than in the
epidemiology of diseases. Our communicative and in-
terpretive abilities give us a great amount of fine-grained
information about the representations we entertain and
about the process they undergo, whereas pain and other
perceptible symptoms generally provide much coarser
and harder-to-interpret information about our patholo-
gies. Also, most events of cultural transmission require
the attention of the participants, whereas pathological
contagion is typically stealthy. Hence cultural transmis-
sion is much easier to spot and observe than disease
transmission.
In spite of the limited evidence at its disposal, medical
epidemiology has provided outstanding causal explana-
tions of epidemiological phenomena. It has done so only
occasionally by following actual causal chains of trans-
mission and much more often by helping to identify the
causal factors and mechanisms at work both within and
across individual organisms. Mutatis mutandis, the task
of the epidemiology of representations is not to describe
in any detail the actual causal chains that stabilize (or
destabilize) a particular cultural representation (although
in some cases it is of great historical interest to be able
to do so) but to identify factors and processes that help
explain the existence and effect of these causal chains.
For instance, showing that a particular folktale has an
optimal structure for human memory and that there are
recurring social situations in a given society in which
people are motivated to tell it or to have it told helps
explain why the tale is told again and again with little
or no distortion of content in that society.
The central question on which an epidemiological ap-
proach focuses is what causes some representations and
practices to become and remain widespread and rela-
728 F c u r r e n t a n t h ro p o l o g y Volume 43, Number 5, December 2002
tively stable in content in a given society at a given time.5
In so framing the question, we depart from the goal of
generally explaining all or even most sociocultural phe-
nomena in one and the same way, either as fulfilling a
function (a coarse functionalist approach) or as contrib-
uting to reproductive success (a coarse sociobiological
approach). True, from an epidemiological point of view,
all explanations of sociocultural phenomena will have
to invoke both mind-external ecological factors linked
to the transmission of cultural contents and mind-in-
ternal psychological factors linked to the mental repre-
sentation and processing of these contents. However, the
particular factors at play and the way they combine vary
with each case (just as, in medical epidemiology, a dif-
ferent combination of organism-internal physiological
factors and of organism-external environmental factors
characterizes each disease). Because of this multiplicity
of co-occurring causes, we aim only at identifying some
of the factors that contribute to explaining particular
instances. These factors play a causal role only in specific
historical and environmental circumstances and there-
fore can never be sufficient to explain the local cultural
forms. Caused in part by the same factors, these forms
have recognizable similarities—which we aim to help
explain. However, we merely identify a couple of im-
portant and recurring factors among many other diverg-
ing factors: each cultural form in its full local specifics
is therefore unique to its particular historical context.
This, of course, is, first of all, simply to return, though
more explicitly and critically, to the general multifac-
torial explanations that were typical of anthropology be-
fore its recent relativist turn. Two things may be new,
though. Rather than accepting implicitly some nonde-
script naturalism or objectivism about kinship, we ap-
peal quite explicitly to naturalistic considerations about
evolved, genetically transmitted psychological predis-
positions. The result of this explicitly naturalistic ac-
count is, however, weaker in its predictive pretensions
than the type of account found, for example, in Goody’s
functionalist thesis. There the sister’s son’s privilege
seemed an almost necessary solution to a structural
problem found in certain patrilineal societies. Similarly,
this solution was to account for the particular form of
the institution, for example, the snatching of significant
property. According to our more explicitly naturalistic
5. How stable do representations have to be to count as “stable”?
From the epidemiological viewpoint, there is no expectation that
there will be a neat bipartition, among all representations that in-
habit a human population, between individual representations that
never stabilize in the community, on the one hand, and cultural
representations that are transmitted over time and social space with
relatively little modification, on the other. We expect, on the con-
trary, to have a continuum of cases between the idiosyncratic and
the widely cultural. This viewpoint differs quite radically from the
memetic approach to culture of Richard Dawkins and others (e.g.,
Dawkins 1976, Blakemore 1999), for which memes are true repli-
cators and other mental contents are not. One might wonder, then,
when a representation is stable enough to be seen as a cultural
representation. We argue, against that very question, that, from an
anthropological point of view, representations are best viewed as
more or less cultural depending on the breadth, duration, and sta-
bility of their distribution.
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but at the same time more modest account, there are
some factors that increase the chances that the sister’s
son privilege will stabilize as a cultural form in these
societies, and we can expect and not be disturbed by a
wide range of unexplained variation in practices because
these will always be combined with many other factors
and many different histories. We avoid, or so we hope,
the too-strong explanations of functionalism, old-style
cultural evolutionism, and sociobiology without giving
up on causal explanation.
A few simple examples will give an idea of the range
of factors that an epidemiological approach would con-
sider relevant and the complex interrelation between
mind-internal and mind-external factors. Density of pop-
ulation is a mind-external factor in the stabilization of
drumming as a means of communication. The fact that
percussion sounds tend to preempt human attention is
a mind-internal factor in the culturally stabilized uses
of percussion instruments. The relative ease with which
human memory retains texts with specific prosodies is
a mind-internal factor in the stabilization of various
forms of poetry; familiarity with specific, historically
evolved poetic forms is a mind-internal factor in the ac-
ceptability, learnability, and therefore chances of cul-
tural stabilization of new poetic works. The effectiveness
of internal combustion engines for moving vehicles is a
mind-external factor contributing to the stabilization of
the techniques involved in constructing and maintaining
these engines. Untutored human minds do not, however,
spontaneously or even easily acquire these techniques;
hence the recognition of the effectiveness of internal
combustion is a mind-internal motivating factor in the
setting up of appropriate institutional teaching without
which the relevant technologies would not stabilize. In-
stitutional teaching itself involves a complex articula-
tion of mind-internal and mind-external factors.
As these examples illustrate, both mind-external and
mind-internal factors explaining cultural phenomena
can pertain just to the natural history of the human spe-
cies and its environment or involve also the sociocultural
history of the populations involved. On the mind-exter-
nal side, density of population is a natural factor that is
found in all living species but can be modified by cultural
factors. Demographic density has a wide variety of cul-
tural effects, the stabilization of drummed communi-
cation in some low-density populations being a marginal
but obvious illustration. On the mind-external side
again, the presence in the environment of vehicles pow-
ered by internal combustion engines is a wholly cultural
factor—which does not mean that it is nonnatural (it is,
after all, the product of evolved mental mechanisms ex-
ploiting natural laws)—that contributes, among many
other sociocultural effects, to the stabilization of the
techniques necessary for their construction and main-
tenance. On the mind-internal side, the tendency of hu-
man attention to be preempted by percussion sounds,
although it can be culturally modified, is basically a nat-
ural trait that humans share with other animals. The
ability to organize knowledge in a hierarchy of concepts
is typically human, and although it is likely to have a
 b l o c h a n d s p e r b e r Kinship and Evolved Psychological Dispositions F 729
strong natural basis it is certainly enhanced by language,
writing, and formal teaching. Familiarity with specific
poetic forms is a wholly cultural trait. This illustrates
an important difference, among several, between the ep-
idemiology of diseases and the epidemiology of repre-
sentations: culture occurs both inside and outside of
minds, whereas diseases qua diseases occur only inside
organisms.
The epidemiological model therefore does not deny the
complexity of the process of human history. It fully rec-
ognizes that culture is both in us and outside—that it is
not (even remotely) just a matter of human beings with
genetically determined mind/brains reacting to diverse
environments according to the dictates of their nature.
But the recognition of this complexity and of the unique
fact that humans are beings that, in a strong and im-
portant sense, make themselves still leaves room for con-
sidering, inter alia, the role of factors such as human
psychological dispositions resulting from natural evo-
lution. However, just as cultural patterns are never sim-
ple phenotypic expressions of genes, they are never sim-
ple social-scale projections of the individual mind.
Culture is not human mentation writ large. It is, rather,
the interaction of psychological dispositions with mind-
external factors in a population that can best explain the
sporadic recurrence of certain types of behaviors and
norms in a whole variety of guises. The inability of other
models to do this—an inability common in the social
sciences—has left anthropology ill-equipped to explain
many of the cross-cultural regularities which have, in
the past, rightly fascinated it.
A rich example of the relationship between evolved
psychological dispositions, mind-external factors, and
cultural phenomena is afforded by the case of language.
A common assumption in cognitive psychology is that
humans come equipped with a language faculty. This
language faculty is neither a language nor a disposition
that generates a language in the individual ex nihilo but
a disposition to acquire a specific language on the basis
of external linguistic inputs. The disposition is assumed
to work like this: Infants react differently to sound pat-
terns typical of human speech: they pay particular at-
tention to these sounds, analyze them differently from
other sounds, look for special evidence such as speaker’s
gaze in order to associate meaning with sound, structure
meaning in partly preformed ways, test their knowledge
by themselves producing speech, and generally develop
a competence in the language of their community. That
the language acquired by the members of a community
depends on the public linguistic productions encoun-
tered in this community is a truism. However, the lan-
guages found in all human communities depend on the
psychological disposition that individuals bring to the
task of language acquisition. Generally, human lan-
guages have to be learnable on the basis of this dispo-
sition. More specifically, phonetic, syntactic, and se-
mantic forms are more likely to stabilize when they are
more easily learnable. All so-called natural human lan-
guages—that is, languages the evolution of which is es-
sentially the output of spontaneous collective linguistic
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activity—will therefore exhibit structural features that
make them highly learnable as a first language by
humans.
Languages—Chinese, English, Maori, and so forth—
differ because they have different histories, with a variety
of factors such as population movements, social strati-
fication, and the presence or absence of writing affecting
these histories in subtle ways. However, these mind-ex-
ternal, place-and-time-specific factors interact in every
generation with the language faculty found in every hu-
man. It is this interaction that determines the relative
stability and the slow transformation of languages and
puts limits on their variability. For a variety of socio-
historical reasons, topics of conversation, preferred
words, socially valued patterns of speech, and so on, vary
continuously over time in such a way that every gen-
eration is presented with a somewhat different sampling
of linguistic inputs, to which it reacts, in the acquisition
process, by unconsciously bringing about minor changes
in the underlying grammar. Generally, whereas day-to-
day cultural changes in language use may introduce new
idiosyncrasies and difficulties such as hard-to-pronounce
borrowed words, the language-learning disposition op-
erating at the generational time scale pulls the mental
representations of these inputs toward more regular and
more easily remembered forms. For instance, the more
difficult phonology of borrowed words or the more dif-
ficult semantics of meanings stipulated as part of so-
phisticated theories are likely to be normalized by lan-
guage learners in the direction of easier forms. This
determines a slow evolution of languages that is con-
strained both by the necessity of intergenerational com-
munication and by the universal constraints of language
acquisition.
The case of language learning, therefore, illustrates
how the existence of a genetically inherited disposition
is a factor in the stabilization of cultural forms not by
directly generating these forms but by causing learners
to pay special attention to certain types of stimuli and
to use—and sometimes distort—the evidence provided
by these stimuli in specific ways. This, of course, leaves
room for much cultural variability. Moreover, disposi-
tions capable of affecting cultural contents may be more
or less rigidly constraining, the language-acquisition de-
vice envisaged by Chomskyans being on the more con-
straining side. In general, cultural representations de-
parting from those favored by underlying dispositions,
though possible, do not stabilize as easily. In the absence
of other stabilizing factors counterbalancing the dispo-
sitions (e.g., institutional support), hard-to-learn repre-
sentations tend to get transformed in the process of trans-
mission in the direction favored by the dispositions.
The epidemiological approach to culture provides a
way of understanding the relationship between psychol-
ogy and culture that neither denies the role of psychology
nor reduces culture to mind. In a nutshell, the idea is
that psychological dispositions in general (whether
evolved basic dispositions or culturally developed dis-
positions) modify the probability—and only the proba-
bility—that representations or practices of some specific
730 F c u r r e n t a n t h ro p o l o g y Volume 43, Number 5, December 2002
tenor will spread, stabilize, and maintain a cultural level
of distribution.
How might all this help explain the regularities in the
relationship between mother’s brother and sister’s son
in patrilineal societies that are the topic of this article?
To this we now turn.
Applying the Theory to the Mother’s Brother/
Sister’s Son Relation
Underlying the theories of the structural-functionalists
concerning the mother’s brother/sister’s son relation in
patrilineal societies was the assumption that all human
beings really reckon kinship bilaterally. This made the
occurrence of unilineal rules to form descent groups
something which somehow “went against nature.” Thus
Fortes (1969) contrasted the domestic domain, in which
relations were governed by biology and natural emotions,
with the lineage domain, which was constrained by po-
litico-jural considerations in conflict with this biology.
For him, therefore, the claims of the sister’s son were a
kind of reassertion of underlying bilaterality. Goody, al-
though distancing himself somewhat from the Fortesian
formulation, seemed to imply something similar in that
the reason the sister’s son was being “cheated” of his
inheritance by the patrilineal rule was that in reality he,
like the maternal uncle’s children, was a true descendant
of his mother’s parents. The objection to Fortes’s and
Goody’s position, however, has been, as we have seen,
that they seemed to assume that people acted in terms
of genetic relations rather than in terms of a very dif-
ferent thing, their representation of socially specified re-
lations. But what if there were some indirect causal link
between social representations and genetic relations?
Then the accusation of naı̈ve empiricism might fall away
and the Fortes/Goody argument might be partly rein-
stated. How this might be possible is what much of the
rest of this paper is about.
We begin by noting that support for the structural-
functionalists’ assumption of the universal bilaterality
of kinship seems to come from an unexpected source.
This is Hamilton’s (1964) neo-Darwinian explanation of
kin altruism and its development in sociobiological the-
ory. However, this kind of theory has been rejected out
of hand by most social and cultural anthropologists (e.g.,
Sahlins 1976). It is necessary to outline the theory of kin
altruism and why it has been rejected to see if, after all,
it might not be used legitimately in favor of the kind of
argument implicit in the writings of Goody and Fortes.
The by-now familiar kin-altruism argument can be
summarized as follows: Genealogical relationships in the
strict biological sense exist among all organisms, in-
cluding humans. The transmission of heritable biological
traits through genealogical relationships is what makes
natural selection possible. Natural selection favors genes
which have the effect, given the environment, of ren-
dering more probable more replications of themselves in
future generations. This includes genes that promote the
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reproduction of the organism in which they are located,
genes that promote behaviors favorable to the survival
and reproduction of descendants of the organism in
which they are located, and also—and this is fundamen-
tal to Hamilton’s thesis—genes that promote survival
and reproduction in yet other organisms which, being
genealogically related, are likely to carry copies of the
same genes. A gene causing an organism to pay a cost
or even to sacrifice itself for the benefit of its lateral kin
may thereby increase the number of copies of itself in
the next generation not through the descendants of the
cost-paying or self-sacrificing organism (which may
thereby lose its chance of reproducing at all) but through
the descendants of the “altruistic” organism’s kin, who
are likely to carry the very same gene.
The potential contribution of kin altruism to what is
known as “inclusive fitness” favors the emergence of a
disposition to helpful behavior adjusted to the genealog-
ical distance between the altruist and the beneficiary.
For such a disposition to exert itself, the organism must
have the possibility of discriminating kin from nonkin
and, among kin, degrees of relatedness. This does not
mean, of course, that the organism must have the con-
ceptual resources to represent genealogical relatedness
and its degrees precisely and as such. What it means is
that, if the ecology is such that degree of relatedness can,
at least roughly, be discriminated thanks to some simple
criterion such as smell, appearance, or habitat, then a
disposition exploiting this possibility may be selected
for.
The importance of the theory of kin altruism for ev-
olutionary biology and for the sociobiological study of
animal behavior is not in dispute, but what are its con-
sequences, if any, for the study of human behavior? At
first sight this theory, transposed directly to humans,
would predict that the requirements of this altruism
should, in humans, favor an instinctually based universal
bilateral recognition of kinship. This would be a priori
support for the structural-functionalists’ assumption.
Here, however, is where the objections of most anthro-
pologists come in.
These objections are fundamentally two. First, the
great variability in kinship systems throughout the globe
seems unaccountable in terms of panhuman character-
istics. Second, humans live in the world via their rep-
resentations, and how one gets from genes to represen-
tations or norms has simply not been thought through
in the sociobiological literature (which has been criti-
cized precisely on this ground by evolutionary psychol-
ogists [see Tooby and Cosmides 1992]).
The first objection means that the explanation in
terms of genes is far too direct. One should note, how-
ever, that the sociobiological position not only is com-
patible with the recognition of some degree of variability
but also purports to explain it. The expression of genes
is always contingent on environmental factors, and it
may be part of the contribution of a gene to the fitness
of the organism that it has different phenotypic expres-
sions in different environments. For instance, the sex of
many reptiles is determined not directly by their genes
 b l o c h a n d s p e r b e r Kinship and Evolved Psychological Dispositions F 731
but by the temperature at which eggs are incubated, fe-
males developing better, it seems, and being more often
born in a warmer environment and males in a colder one
(Shine, Elphick, and Harlow 1995).
Closer to our present concern, Alexander (1979) offers
an explanation of both matrilineal inheritance and sis-
ter’s-son rights in patrilineal societies in terms of un-
certainty of paternity. An evolved disposition to favor
kin should be sensitive to degrees of doubt or certainty
of relatedness. In particular, a man’s investment in his
putative children should be sensitive to his degree of
confidence that he is actually their biological father. If
there are reasons that this degree of confidence should
be low, then a man’s closest relatives in the next gen-
eration may well be his sister’s children. On this basis,
Alexander predicts “that a general society-wide lowering
of confidence of paternity will lead to a society-wide
prominence, or institutionalization, of mother’s brother
as an appropriate male dispenser of parental benefits”
(1979:172). One may accept the premise that there is an
evolved disposition to favor kin that is sensitive to con-
fidence in relatedness and yet doubt Alexander’s conclu-
sion, in particular regarding the institutionalization of
matrilineal inheritance. True, there is ethnographic ev-
idence that confidence in paternity tends, with excep-
tions, to be lower in matrilineal than in patrilineal so-
ciety, as the case of the 19th-century Nayars illustrates
(Gough 1959), but it is most probably even lower in so-
cieties which have neither matrilineal nor patrilineal de-
scent groups (Gibson 1986, Stack 1983). Furthermore, a
correlation is not sufficient to determine that there is a
direct causal relationship, let alone what the direction
of such a causal relationship might be.
The ethnographic and historical record shows that
matrilineality and patrilineality and related patterns of
inheritance are fairly stable systems, with very rare doc-
umented examples (such as Barnes 1951) of a society’s
shifting from one to the other. In contrast, changes in
sexual mores toward or away from greater permissive-
ness and associated lower confidence in paternity are
very common and may be caused by rapidly shifting ec-
onomic, demographic, or ideological factors. It cannot be
the case, then, that a lowering of confidence in paternity
systematically or even frequently leads to the institu-
tionalization of matrilineality. Alexander’s claim, there-
fore, is at best unconvincing. One could, for that matter,
argue that the lower confidence in paternity in matrilin-
eal society is an effect rather than (or as much as) a cause
of the descent system. When the inheritance system is
matrilineal, then a man knows that his heirs will be his
sister’s children rather than those of his wife. His
chances of investing in his wife’s children’s welfare may
be further reduced by rules of separate residence of the
spouses such as are often found in matrilineal societies.
To the extent that the opportunities for a man to invest
resources in his wife’s children are limited, it may matter
relatively less whether these children are biologically his
own, especially if the counterpart of greater paternity
doubts is a greater chance of having children with other
men’s wives. This fits well with the common ethno-
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graphic observation that in most matrilineal societies
there is less control over the sexual fidelity of women.
Extending Alexander’s line of reasoning to the case
with which we are concerned here, one would predict
that the chances of having institutionalized privileges
for the sister’s son in an otherwise truly patrilineal sys-
tem will be greater when paternity doubts are greater
(but not great enough to tip the system over toward
matrilineality). In this case, however, we know of no
evidence of a correlation between institutionalized priv-
ileges of sister’s son and paternity doubts, let alone a
causal link in the hypothesized direction.
The second standard anthropological objection to a bi-
ological account implies that, even if we accept that a
disposition to Hamiltonian kin altruism is biologically
advantageous and therefore likely to have somehow
evolved (something which is clearly plausible), it is not
clear at all what would follow regarding cultural norms
of human behavior. The answer is probably nothing di-
rectly and unconditionally, since dispositions to behav-
ior need not actually lead to behavior, let alone to cul-
turally codified behavior; they may be offset or inhibited
in many ways. Moreover, assuming that a disposition is
not inhibited, it still need not be reflected in a cultural
norm. In most human society, for instance, the dispo-
sition to use, under certain conditions, an eyebrow flash
as a sign of recognition is both uninhibited and culturally
uncodified (see Eibl-Eibesfeldt 1975). Should we, then,
as do most cultural and social anthropologists, simply
forget about all this biological stuff and, along with the
theologians and philosophers of old, recognize that the
categorical uniqueness of human beings frees them com-
pletely from animality?
The epidemiological approach offers a way of avoiding
this type of dismissal while taking into account what is
valuable in the objections. Let us accept, as a hypothesis,
that there is an evolved disposition to try to differentiate
people in a way sensitive to their degree of genealogical
relatedness to self. It is most unlikely that such a dis-
position would be such as to cause the individual to seek
actual genealogical information. It would be rather a dis-
position merely to seek whatever available information
might indicate relatedness to self.6 Now, such a dispo-
sition would favor the cultural stabilization of systems
of representation providing for such ego-centered differ-
entiation without determining their exact nature. The
disposition would not be the source of these represen-
tations; these would arise as part of the process of dis-
tribution of ideas and practices—the historical dialectic
of thought and communications, so to speak—and its
interaction with the individual cognitive development
of the members of every new generation. The epidemi-
ological approach seeks factors explaining the transfor-
mation and stabilization of representations in the pro-
6. Hirschfeld (1984) can be read as suggesting a similar approach
and insisting, quite rightly, that an essential relatedness and not
just any kind of relatedness is aimed at, but his description of this
kind of relatedness in terms of a “natural resemblance” seems to
us inadequate.
732 F c u r r e n t a n t h ro p o l o g y Volume 43, Number 5, December 2002
cess of their transmission, including biological factors.
It does not pretend, as might a classical sociobiological
approach, that these biological factors somehow generate
the representations or that culturally sanctioned behav-
iors are phenotypic expressions of genes.
One prediction that would follow from the hypothesis
we are considering is that individuals would tend to
show interest in evidence of relatedness, whether or not
culturally codified. For instance, if a single kinship cat-
egory included full sibling, half-sibling, and more distant
relatives, with the same cultural norms of behavior vis-
à-vis all, individuals would nevertheless tend to differ-
entiate both cognitively and behaviorally between the
different types of individual falling into this category
(see, e.g., Bloch 1998). This further interest could be car-
ried out individually without being particularly cultur-
ally condoned, as we have just envisaged, or it could
contribute to the stabilization of further cultural repre-
sentations (e.g., folk theories, tales, alternative or com-
plementary terminologies for kin) drawing finer-grained
distinctions than the basic kinship-terms system. In
other words, whenever representations involving clas-
sifications and norms which distinguish kin in terms of
closeness appeared amidst the babble and multiplicity of
other representations caused either by individual imag-
inations and circumstances or by more general socio-
historical circumstances, these particular representa-
tions would seem strangely “right,” “attractive,”
“natural,” or “obvious” to people. This would be the case
without individuals’ being at all sure why these repre-
sentations had these qualities, and even if they gave rea-
sons these reasons would often be merely post hoc
rationalizations.
Assuming this general framework, we would make the
following predictions: In unilineal systems where trans-
mission of rights and goods and generally helpful behav-
ior creates an inequality of treatment among individuals
that are equally closely related to ego and therefore goes
against the predisposition in question, there should be a
general, nondeterministic tendency to compensate for
this imbalance. Norms or institutions capable of playing,
in such a system, a compensatory role would simply
stand a greater chance of stabilizing than in systems
where the imbalance did not exist in the first place. The
special rights of the sister’s son found in some patrilineal
cultures could well be a case in point.
The relationship between biological disposition and
cultural norm that we are envisaging in this case is one
between a biological causal factor that is obviously not
sufficient and maybe not necessary but such as to render
more probable the emergence and stabilization of norms
of the type in question. We emphasize that this more
sophisticated naturalism makes, in this case, weaker
claims than the common-sense naturalism of anthro-
pologists such as the 19th-century cultural evolutionists
and Malinowski, Radcliffe-Brown, Fortes, and Goody.
According to their common-sense naturalism, there are
natural kinship facts that people are somehow aware of
and that guide their sentiments and behaviors. This
makes a strong universalistic claim about human cog-
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nition, emotion, and behavior, which are taken to be
neatly attuned to natural facts. If these classical claims
appear misleadingly weaker and more acceptable than
those we are tentatively considering here, it is only be-
cause they are made, for the most part, implicitly,
whereas we have tried to spell out a possible naturalistic
approach.
According to the approach we are considering, there
are indeed biological facts and, in particular, genealogical
relationships. These, however, need not be cognized as
such by people. A predisposition to attend to reliable
correlates of these relationships cognitively, emotion-
ally, or behaviorally in one or several of a multiplicity
of possible ways is likely to have evolved in many spe-
cies, including the human species. In humans, this at-
tention to relatedness encounters a wealth of relevant
cultural inputs. More specifically, developing children,
searching their environment for evidence of relatedness
to others, find kinship terms (“kinship” now in the cul-
tural rather than the biological sense), people identified
as related to them by means of these terms, do’s and
don’ts relating to kinship categories, folk theories, etc.
Because of their evolved disposition, they attend to this
information or even seek it, retain it, use it to guide their
behavior, and become, in turn, transmitters of such
information.
At this stage we seem to be just defending a weakened,
updated and explicit version of the implicit or less ex-
plicit naturalistic claims of Fortes and Goody regarding
the mother’s brother/sister’s son relation in certain pat-
rilineal societies. In fact, given the sweeping and careless
way in which these claims have been dismissed, this is
worth doing in any case. We are defending them, how-
ever, in a way that is not contradicted by the very real
uniqueness of each case. Furthermore, in contrast to so-
ciobiologists assuming a fairly direct connection be-
tween genes and culture, we claim only an indirect re-
lationship of genetically favored receptivity to specific
information, favoring in turn the stabilization of cultural
representations of a more or less specific tenor.
Why Ritualized Transgression?
From Junod to Goody, ethnographers have stressed the
transgressive style in which the sister’s son’s rights are
exerted. This may take many forms, from ritualized in-
sults among the BaThonga to ritualized snatching of
meat among the Lo Dagaba. Why should it be so? The
general approach we are proposing might help us under-
stand not just the recurrence of the recognition of the
subsidiary rights of the sister’s son in his mother’s
brother’s property but also the ritualized transgressions
so often involved in exerting those rights.
From a cultural-epidemiological point of view, cultural
norms (such as the norm that authorizes a Lo Dagaba
man to snatch meat from his mother’s brother) are just
a kind of representation that is widely distributed in a
population through various processes of transmission.
What makes them norms is the fact that they represent
 b l o c h a n d s p e r b e r Kinship and Evolved Psychological Dispositions F 733
the way things are required or allowed to be. In the social
science literature, norms are mostly envisaged as causes
of behaviors conforming to them. However, norms play
other causal roles which may be no less important. In
particular, they serve to confer approval or blame on be-
haviors attributed to oneself or to others or just on be-
haviors that occur very rarely, if at all, but the very pos-
sibility of which captures the imagination and defines
the limits of what is acceptable. In most societies, for
instance, norms against cannibalism are much more im-
portant as a topic of narrative and conversation than as
a guide for behavior. It would be interesting to know
how much the norm permitting a sister’s son to take his
mother’s brother’s goods in one or another ritualized way
results in actual taking of goods with significant eco-
nomic effects as opposed to being a topic of conversation
with occasional symbolic enactments, serving to define
social roles more than to reallocate economic resources.
Alas, the literature does not seem to offer the kind of
data that would answer this question. Moreover, things
are likely to differ in this respect across different soci-
eties and times.
Norms are not just causes of behaviors but also effects
of behaviors. Their spreading is caused by the different
types of behaviors that they promote. In other words,
norms are cultural to the extent that they are distributed
by causal chains in which mental representations of the
norms and public behaviors (including public statements
of the norm) alternate. Again, it would be interesting to
know how much a norm such as that permitting goods
snatching is maintained by actual acts of snatching and
how much by statements of and about the norm.
Both universal and culture-specific factors may con-
tribute to the acceptability and attractiveness of a norm
and therefore to its chance of reaching, in a given socio-
historical situation, a cultural level of distribution.
Whatever the extent to which a norm permitting ritu-
alized transgression causes behaviors that conform to it,
the cultural stability of the norm is a sign of its psycho-
logical acceptability and attractiveness—which have to
be explained. Here we propose some considerations rel-
evant to such an explanation.
Suppose that there is a type of behavior that, for dif-
ferent reasons, is simultaneously attractive and unat-
tractive in the same society. As a result, there are, in
that society, factors that would favor the stabilization of
a norm approving this behavior and other factors that
would favor the stabilization of a norm prohibiting it.
Under such conditions, the stabilization of one of the
two types of norm is an obvious obstacle to the stabi-
lization of the other, opposite type.
In such a case, things can go in one of three ways. The
first possibility is that indeed the stabilization of one
norm effectively counteracts factors that would have fa-
vored the stabilization of the other. For instance, reli-
gious iconoclastic movements have, in different socie-
ties, effectively suppressed any type of image even
though receptivity to iconic representations, we assume,
was still psychologically present and would otherwise
have favored the cultural approval of image production.
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Here a psychological disposition, although present, fails
to favor any direct cultural expression. The second pos-
sibility is that the factors favoring opposite norms end
up stabilizing some compromise norm, as when images
are accepted and even encouraged but only with religious
themes. Then there is a third possibility, in which the
stabilization of one norm contributes to the stabilization
of a well-contained, ritualized form of the opposite norm.
One norm dominates, but the other norm applies in
clearly insulated circumstances. This state of affairs may
actually contribute to the stability of the dominant norm
by highlighting the exceptional character of its occa-
sional violation. Thus Bloch (1987) has argued that the
sexual chaos expected at certain stages of Malagasy royal
rituals must be seen as “scene setting” for the extreme
domestic order dramatized in the next stage.
The behavior studied by Goody might well be such a
case of a potential conflict of norms that results in the
stabilization of two sharply contrasting cultural norms
caused by very different factors. One, patrilineal descent
and inheritance, is wholly dominant, while the other,
the rights of the sister’s son, takes the form of an au-
thorized transgression with ritual aspects the very trans-
gressive character of which contributes to the stabili-
zation of the dominant patrilineal norm. This suggestion
is, of course, reminiscent of a line of argument famously
initiated by Gluckman (1954) and developed by the Man-
chester school, in particular in the work of Victor Turner
(1969). What the epidemiological approach does and the
Gluckman-type explanation does not, however, is seek
to explain the macrocultural fact of the asymmetrical
equilibrium between a dominant norm and its author-
ized or even prescribed transgression in terms of factors
affecting the microprocesses of cultural transmission.
Given the stabilization of a patrilineal norm (the ex-
planation of which is not the topic of this article) and
the persistence of evolved psychological factors favoring
investment of resources in all close kin, whether patri-
lineally or matrilineally related, we may expect individ-
uals to welcome expressions of these psychological fac-
tors provided that they are not incompatible with the
patrilineal norm they have internalized. These psycho-
logical factors may find an expression through the in-
formal helping by the mother’s brother of his sister’s
children. Here, however, we are talking of individual at-
titudes rather than of a culturally sanctioned practice. A
cultural practice that acknowledges the rights of one’s
sister’s children would normally go against the patrilin-
eal norm and would be unlikely to stabilize (unless the
patrilineal norm itself was in the process of destabili-
zation). Expressing interest in the sister’s son/mother’s
brother relationship while highlighting the fact that this
relationship does not ground normal, regular rights of
sharing or inheritance is a way of reasserting by contrast
that very patrilineal norm. More specifically, ritualized
transgression practices of the type we are discussing here
underscore the out-of-the-ordinary character of a sister’s
son’s rights over his mother’s brother’s goods and thereby
contribute to highlighting the normal character of pat-
rilineal transmission of goods. Thus the combination of
734 F c u r r e n t a n t h ro p o l o g y Volume 43, Number 5, December 2002
the dominant patrilineal norm internalized by all mem-
bers of the society and the psychological factors favoring
all close kin renders people receptive and welcoming to
a norm of ritualized expression of sister’s-son rights.
The norms and practices of ritualized transgression
that are likely thus to stabilize are “catchy” because of
their psychological rather than because of their eco-
nomic effects. These are first and foremost “symbolic”
practices that need not have any significant—let alone
any major—effect regarding the actual allocation of re-
sources between direct and lateral descendants. This is
a further contrast between the epidemiological account
we are sketching here and any sociobiological account
that would explain such practices in terms of their pu-
tative effects, through reallocation of economic re-
sources, on social stability or biological fitness.
All that we have said, of course, does not amount to
a comprehensive explanation of the particular forms of
the sister’s son’s privileges in any one of the societies
discussed by so many ethnographers, and it is important
to understand why. There are two reasons for this—
besides the very sketchy character of our attempt. First,
we have relied on the hypothesis that there is an evolved
human disposition that is aimed at modulating behavior
in a way sensitive to degrees of biological relatedness,
but this hypothesis is based on speculation, however
well-motivated, more than on conclusive hard evidence.
Secondly, we are not offering an explanation for why, for
example, Lo Dagaba sister’s sons behave in precisely the
way they do. Indeed, we think a unifactorial or bifactorial
explanation of such an ethnographic datum would in-
evitably be insufficient. Actual cultural practices, as per-
formed by specific individuals at a given time, are em-
bedded in the sociohistorical processes that have
distributed, stabilized, and transformed cultural repre-
sentations and practices in the population to which these
individuals belong. Each of these historical flows is
unique. These processes are influenced by many types
of factors, evolved psychological predispositions being
only one of them. Mostly, cultural processes are influ-
enced by other cultural processes. People’s behavior, in
particular their conformity or nonconformity to norms,
is guided by the representations they have of the world
rather than by the way the world is. People’s represen-
tations are influenced in several ways by the phenomena
they are about, but they are influenced also—and to a
greater extent in most cases of interest to anthropolo-
gists—by other representations, in particular culturally
transmitted ones.
All these difficulties and caveats do not mean that we
need to abandon generalizing explanations of the kind
we have attempted here. In other words, the recognition
of the value of the objections to kinship studies of such
as Needham and Schneider need not lead to a denial of
the relevance of general unifying causes, amongst which
are some universal human dispositions likely to have
been naturally selected in the course of evolution. Such
a method, precisely because it sets nonabsolute condi-
tions for the expression of general factors, can overcome
the difficulty which we highlighted at the beginning of
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this paper and which seems to have overwhelmed an-
thropology. Reasoning in terms of such things as evolved
human dispositions has all too often produced too pow-
erful explanations, while the refusal to try to explain
obvious though partial recurrences across cultures in the
end seems perverse and inevitably leaves anthropological
questions to be naı̈vely answered by others.
Comments
monique borgerhoff mulder
Department of Anthropology and Graduate Group in
Ecology, University of California, Davis, Calif. 95616,
U.S.A. (mborgerhoffmulder@ucdavis.edu). 4 v1 02
Bloch and Sperber’s paper is remarkable for its honest
recognition of general patterns seen across human so-
cieties and their need for an explanation. For anyone
deeply committed to an evolutionary and comparative
approach, it is a delight to read. I hope that its eloquent
portrayal of the complex and indirect links between
dominant institutions, specific circumstances, and
evolved psychological dispositions will help dispel the
antagonism that most anthropologists still feel toward
comparative studies, evolutionary frameworks, or both.
My commentary elaborates on the complementarities
and differences between the approach of evolutionary
social scientists and Bloch and Sperber’s so-called epi-
demiological model (an unfortunate term because of its
links with memetics [Laland and Brown 2002], an ap-
proach that they would undoubtedly reject).
I strongly agree with them on the need to return to
the multifactorial explanations that were typical of an-
thropology prior to its engagement with relativism and
to dissolve the nature/culture distinction. We agree also
on a naturalist approach that includes, as one element,
the existence of evolved, genetically transmitted psy-
chological predispositions that cause people to pay at-
tention to certain types of stimuli; these mechanisms
interact with a host of historical factors and current cir-
cumstances to produce behavioral outcomes that will
themselves shape norms and institutions in the future.
Most of us also recognize that a functional model cannot
deny the full force of human history. Human behavioral
ecologists have recently begun to borrow methods from
biology to tackle this issue. With the introduction of
comparative methods designed to control for shared his-
tory, it is now possible to incorporate quantitatively into
an evolutionary approach the extent to which history
influences current social practice and norms (Borgerhoff
Mulder et al. 2001).
Bloch and Sperber seek to restore legitimacy to com-
parative studies without overlooking previous criti-
cisms, particularly with regard to the universality and
ontological status of elements to be compared. Their
commitment to what they call “non-naı̈ve” comparison
appeals strongly to evolutionary anthropologists inter-
 b l o c h a n d s p e r b e r Kinship and Evolved Psychological Dispositions F 735
ested in patterns of cultural variability, though they do
not take their empirical analysis as far as a human be-
havioral ecologist would. With respect to the issue of
lineality, they are right in arguing that simple biological
relatedness fails to explain why, when r (genealogical
relatedness) is equal, paternal kin are stronger targets of
affection, altruism, and reliance than maternal kin or
vice versa, but they fail to emphasize (though they
clearly appreciate) that r is simply a weighting term in
the predictive model. As has long been understood by
anthropologists, individuals will choose to associate
with kin related through males or females depending on
considerations of property, defense, labor cooperation,
etc. These ideas and their implications for an evolution-
ary approach to sociocultural diversity in kinship organ-
ization were carefully analyzed by Irons (1979) over 20
years ago. Since then human behavioral ecologists and
others have conducted extensive comparative analyses
of the extraordinary variation in kinship institutions
worldwide, focusing not just on linearity but on marriage
payments, polygyny, polyandry, residence patterns, in-
heritance, etc. Each of these studies could easily be re-
formulated within Bloch and Sperber’s framework of rep-
resentations, and doing so would promote more careful
mechanistic thinking.
One more complementarity between the approaches
lies in Bloch and Sperber’s focus on institutions. As in
other areas of anthropology guided by methodological
individualism (Ensminger and Knight 1997), evolution-
ary social scientists grapple poorly with the ontogeny
and persistence of institutions. As Bloch and Sperber
note, how you get from genes to representations or norms
is not well thought-through. Their focus on institutions
rather than individual behavior nicely complements be-
havioral ecology’s more micro-scale analyses.
Finally, the differences: Bloch and Sperber contrast
their epidemiological approach with a “coarser socio-
biological account” that would explain practices in
terms of putative effects on fitness. While evolutionary
social scientists differ radically with respect to their con-
cern with measuring fitness differentials (Smith, Bor-
gerhoff Mulder, and Hill 2001), human behavioral ecol-
ogists would indeed look to see how sister’s son privilege
varied in relation to the stability and appropriateness of
the dominant patrilineal ideology in a given context.
Therefore they might predict greater elaboration of the
sister’s son’s rights (ritual or other) in certain circum-
stances. Low paternity certainty might be one such fac-
tor, though, as Bloch and Sperber and others (Flinn 1981,
Gaulin and Schlegel 1980) note, it is not necessarily a
causal variable in these scenarios; other factors that
might promote a sister’s son’s privileges include changes
in the economic patterns of production, security consid-
erations, and migratory options, each of which can im-
pinge on the adaptive value of purely patrilineal inher-
itance. Absence of support for such predictions would
not falsify Bloch and Sperber’s broader hypothesis re-
garding the role of evolved psychological factors in sta-
bilizing norms of ritualized expression. But the test itself
enables human behavioral ecologists to move away from
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a troubling tendency among evolutionary psychologists
to universalize (and essentialize) evolved human predis-
positions, particularly with respect to the emergence of
these dispositions in hypothetical “Pleistocene” condi-
tions. We like to keep open the conceptual possibility
that human predispositions are an accretion of ancient
and more modern influences. We do this by designing
methodologies that allow us to evaluate the adaptive
value of revisions, modifications, and variations of be-
havior. My hope is that Bloch and Sperber’s path-break-
ing and integrative approach to cross-cultural regularities
will retain the same open-mindedness.
james s. boster
Department of Anthropology, University of
Connecticut, Storrs, Conn. 06269-2176, U.S.A.
(boster@sp.uconn.edu). 11 vii 02
The principal proposal of this paper, that humans have
“an evolved disposition to favor relatives,” should not
be controversial. After all, such a disposition is well doc-
umented among other animals, as when free-tailed bats
returning to a colony find and nourish their own off-
spring among thousands of pups (Balcombe and Mc-
Cracken 1992) or when tiger salamanders preferentially
cannibalize nonkin over kin (Pfennig 2002). It would be
stingy to deny the capacity for kin recognition and kin-
based altruism to humans as well, if it were not also well
documented (e.g., Burnstein, Crandall, and Kitayama
1997, Cialdini et al. 1997, Essock-Vitale and McGuire
1985, Kendrick 1991, Kruger 2001, Matthews et al. 1981).
The key question is how the evolved disposition gives
rise to different behaviors in different ecological con-
texts. Bloch and Sperber do not address this question,
and it is hard to see how their account is an improvement
over Goody’s (1959) treatment of the tolerated theft from
mother’s brother by sister’s son in patrilineal societies,
as they themselves astutely state.
As did Goody, they explain the tolerated theft in terms
of a universal human attention to bilateral kinship, dif-
fering in explicitly stating that the disposition is an
evolved one. However, Goody’s account is superior in
that it more explicitly explains variation: his model pro-
poses and demonstrates a correlation between the
amount of disparity between the flow of inheritance to
descendants of daughters versus sons and the amount of
tolerated theft. In contrast, Bloch and Sperber’s model
posits a universal disposition to favor kin which predis-
poses humans to accept some ideas more readily than
others. What ideas are available is a matter of historical
accident. In other words, they propose a regression model
with a constant (the universal disposition) and an error
term (the historical accidents) but no variables.
A related problem is that they present neither new data
nor a complete reanalysis of the existing data. Instead,
they offer a style guide for just-so stories—a “visuali-
zation” or sketch of the structure of an analysis but not
the analysis itself. This makes it difficult to resolve some
of the apparent contradictions in the argument (e.g., their
736 F c u r r e n t a n t h ro p o l o g y Volume 43, Number 5, December 2002
floating between extreme cultural relativism and a skep-
tical realism). Their failure to present any new evidence
is particularly troubling when they use an absence of
evidence to dismiss Alexander’s (1979) argument. It is
true that, as they state, there is “no evidence showing a
correlation between institutionalized privileges of sis-
ter’s son and paternity doubts,” but this is because the
study has not been done. If it were to be done, it very
likely would show the relation Alexander expected, be-
cause other studies have shown diminishing paternal in-
vestment with decreasing paternity certainty (e.g., the
papers in Beckerman and Valentine 2002). An absence of
evidence is not evidence of absence.
Although theorizing about the social distribution of
cultural beliefs is an interesting project, I believe that
the metaphor of an epidemiology of representations is
not the most useful for the enterprise. It puts too much
agency in the ideas themselves rather than the individual
humans who believe them. A more useful metaphor is
an economic one (Boster 1991), for it encourages one to
view representations as constructed, distributed, and
used in ways that serve the interests of the human be-
lievers rather than the ideas believed. Ironically, even
though Sperber has critiqued Dawkins’s (1976) concept
of the meme, his concept shares with Dawkins’s a pre-
sumption of the agency of ideas and the passivity of their
human hosts. This contributes to the problem men-
tioned above: beyond the universal human disposition
to favor kin, all the rest is chance because the differential
acceptance of certain ideas (e.g., the tolerated theft) is
not viewed as serving the interests of the individual hu-
man actors.
A final problem is the use of “sociobiology” as a foil.
Who are the authors talking about when they refer to
sociobiologists? The only sociobiologist cited is Alex-
ander (1979), the date of whose work is, coincidentally,
the median publication date of their references. Al-
though the literature on kinship from a structural-func-
tionalist point of view may have been quiescent since
the late seventies, research in human behavioral ecology
and evolutionary psychology has been booming. I do not
know of any contemporary advocate of an evolutionary
perspective on human beings who believes that genes
directly encode cultural representations. The dominant
contemporary Darwinian perspective on humans is that
of behavioral ecology, which asserts that humans are ge-
netically similar but phenotypically (and culturally) di-
verse: The same genotype is facultatively expressed as
different behavioral phenotypes depending on signals
from the environment. The position Bloch and Sperber
take is actually more similar to the one that they stig-
matize as “sociobiology” than any taken by behavioral
ecologists in that it is more committed to a biologically
based, invariant human nature. This is puzzling because
Sperber, in his other work, has shown a deep appreciation
of how evolution has crafted human minds to think dif-
ferently about different things (e.g., Sperber and Hirsch-
feld 1999).
In sum, I agree with the proposition that humans have
an evolved disposition to favor kin. I agree that that dis-
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position is part of an explanation of the question at hand.
And I exhort the authors to follow their “visualization”
with an actual research project that more directly en-
gages the theories, issues, and results of contemporary
behavioral ecology and evolutionary psychology.
m i c h a e l f . b ro w n
Department of Anthropology and Sociology, Williams
College, Williamstown, Mass. 01267, U.S.A.
(mbrown@williams.edu). 4 iv 02
Bloch and Sperber’s reanalysis of one of the discipline’s
foundational riddles may be a sign that anthropology is
slouching toward a Bethlehem in which the practice of
cultural comparison will be reborn. When we abandoned
the comparative project two decades ago, we ceded it to
reductionists (think evolutionary psychology) who are
pleased to have this particular sandbox to themselves.
By offering a nuanced, nonreductionistic approach to
comparison, Bloch and Sperber make a case for renewed
attention to cross-cultural similarities and differences.
One only wishes that the results of their effort were
more arresting. An uncharitable gloss goes something
like this: “In societies with unilineal descent, practices
involving special relations with close matrilateral kin
will arise naturally unless other factors intervene to pre-
vent this from happening.” Such a modest conclusion is
unlikely to bring comparativists back from the academic
Elbas to which they have been exiled. A more sympa-
thetic rendering of Bloch and Sperber’s thesis is that by
identifying strong panhuman tendencies, which can be
muted or redirected by the complex web of ecological or
culture-historical forces in which every social system
operates, anthropologists are better able to discover new
and illuminating comparative questions. This is still not
electrifying news but worthy of serious consideration.
What I find mystifying is Bloch and Sperber’s reluc-
tance to acknowledge affinities to the growing body of
work on complexity, emergent structures, and self-or-
ganizing systems. They use some of the idioms of this
literature—when, for instance, they refer to culture as a
“flow of information”—but resist others. How is an ex-
pression like “epidemiology of representations” different
from or preferable to “memes” (Dawkins 1976)? It is easy
to understand why Bloch and Sperber want to distance
themselves from Dawkins’s genetic determinism, but
more recent work (see, e.g., Balkin 1998) has moved be-
yond simplistic models of selfish genes and maximiza-
tion of inclusive fitness. An attraction of the latest it-
eration of complexity theory is that it promises to
reconcile or transcend the exhausted dichotomies
against which Bloch and Sperber struggle in this essay:
mind/brain, constructed/real, software/hardware, cul-
ture/nature (Taylor 2001:230).
Complexity theory has gained a following among ar-
chaeologists and ecological anthropologists. In sociocul-
tural anthropology, however, it hasn’t proved “catchy”
(to use another of Bloch and Sperber’s metaphors), per-
haps because few scholars have succeeded in translating
 b l o c h a n d s p e r b e r Kinship and Evolved Psychological Dispositions F 737
the resolutely abstract theories of Luhmann (1986) and
others into ethnographically satisfying accounts. Does
Bloch and Sperber’s essay lay the groundwork for a wave
of complexity-focused comparative analysis? It is too
soon to tell, but I found myself engaged by the attempt.
ro s a r i o c a l d e r ó n
Departamento de Biologı́a Animal y Genética,
Apartado 644, Universidad del Pais Vasco, E-48080
Bilbao, Spain (ggpcafer@lg.ehu.es). 30 v 02
“All members of a human community are linked one to
another across time and space by a flow of information”
that is not just cultural but genetic. Bloch and Sperber’s
central question, “what causes some practices to become
and remain widespread and stable,” remains unan-
swered. The statement that “psychological dispositions
. . . modify the probability—and only the probabil-
ity—that representations or practices . . . will spread,
stabilize, and maintain a cultural level of distribution”
seems a rather vague and unhelpful response.
I do not agree that “the phenomena described by an-
thropologists under the label of ‘kinship’ are cultural and
therefore historical constructions . . . rather than . . .
facts of biological kinship.” Both standpoints should
have been considered. Animals and humans (another an-
imal species) change their genomes to become geneti-
cally different. Whether humans can change their ge-
nomes, consciously or not, through cultural rules and
therefore differ significantly from the other animal spe-
cies is another question. We must distinguish among (a)
kinship as a biological fact, (b) kinship as a personal or
social perception, and (c) patrilineal inheritance as a
mode of property acquisition.
Biological kinship between two individuals is a quan-
titative value that may be close or distant. This value
was unknown in primitive societies and could only be
evaluated after the discovery and development of Men-
del’s laws. Biological kinship affects the biology of hu-
man populations through their genotypic distributions
and genetic loads.
Social kinship is a qualitative rule relating persons
with or without biological kinship. It usually involves
close biological kinship (two generations above and two
below ego) as well as affinity. Even though social and
biological kinship are not related, people identify a cer-
tain (usually erroneous) association between the two that
vary over time and from one society to another. Family
relationship has been related to transmission of blood
(representing the spirit) and of flesh. This idea is quite
different from genetic transmission as we know it today.
Social kinship causes marriage preferences and avoid-
ances among some members of society and affects bio-
logical kinship. Consequently, the two concepts are not
equivalent, and historical societies have misunderstood
what biological kinship means.
Patrilineal inheritance is basically a discontinuous,
qualitative character in many societies. For example, one
person may inherit all the patrimony while his relatives
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are dispossessed. The context in which these cases occur
must be taken in account. A certain degree of social de-
velopment is required to introduce the norm of inheri-
tance; there must be property to be transmitted and the
power to ensure conformity to the norm. The utility of
the transmission of undivided property must be recog-
nized, and there must be life span sufficient to permit
the heir to manage the inheritance properly and a certain
family size. Patrilineal inheritance would not have af-
fected biology, offering the heir increased life expectancy
or higher fertility in relation to the dispossessed. Fur-
thermore, it is quite unlikely that the heir’s advantage
could have been sustained for several generations. More-
over, the relative importance of other modes of property
acquisition such as trade, warfare, and raiding must be
considered.
The transgressive and tolerated violence of the behav-
iour analysed does no harm to inheritance rules and the
system of property in the community, which remain un-
changed through time. It affects neither biological nor
social kinship. Thus this kind of behaviour should be
seen as a ritual that does not threaten but consolidates
the property rules of the societies in which it is practised.
jack goody
St. John’s College, Cambridge University, Cambridge,
U.K. (jrgl@cam.ac.uk). 31 v 02
Bloch and Sperber’s article is important for much more
than the mother’s brother. It attempts to apply the ar-
guments of a branch of cognitive science to the study of
kinship in rather the same way that their colleague Pas-
cal Boyer has tried to do for religion. It would need an
article at least to deal with all the careful philosophical
and scientific points that it raises. The project is ap-
pealing for several reasons. In the first place, it takes us
beyond the uniqueness argument (to which they them-
selves resort at the end of the article) that has bogged
down creativity in much contemporary social science;
of course each blade of grass is different, but that does
not stop us from looking for common features. Secondly,
it is prepared to deal with “universals.” I myself do not
see the problem as an opposition of “cultural particu-
larity” to “universals”; comparison can deal with wide-
spread but universal phenomena such as the character-
istics of redheads, which may have a biological
component but equally may be (as with the footballer
Freddie Lindberg and his imitators) a matter of dying the
hair. The problem can only be resolved by empirical in-
vestigation (or possibly by conceptual reformulation).
Lastly, it is important to try and make contact with the
findings of related disciplines. Sociocultural anthropol-
ogists are too prone to think that they alone hold the
key to human behaviour and that others should follow
their unilineal shifts from one approach to another.
Bloch and Sperber are right historically about the move
away from comparative studies and towards a vaguely
postmodern cultural particularism. They are, I think,
wrong in assuming that the comparative students of kin-
738 F c u r r e n t a n t h ro p o l o g y Volume 43, Number 5, December 2002
ship “deluded themselves they had been dealing with
biological facts.” I think Lévi-Strauss, Leach, Fortes, and
others would have strongly resisted this suggestion more
strongly than Malinowski. In my view, these anthro-
pologists did not perhaps allow enough room for biolog-
ical facts, though in behavioural terms these are always
modified by cultural factors. Even if it is agreed that they
were dealing with representations (and is not all socio-
cultural life?) and all had “unique histories,” it is diffi-
cult to see why cross-cousin marriage or incest, which
are of course human constructs, do not also have com-
mon elements. And, indeed, were the differences purely
random affairs as the uniqueness argument assumes?
Who, except perhaps Lévi-Strauss in the atom of kin-
ship and Fortes at a similar level, was ever looking for
“universals”? If there was a tendency to set aside biology
at this level (as most strongly with Leach and Schneider),
perhaps not “universals” but at least widespread simi-
larities were often taken into account without biology,
although all are constrained by the human mind and by
its psychology. The question we have to ask all the time
is how far constrained, and that seems to me an empirical
question.
I am not at all sure that the dichotomy of mind-ex-
ternal and mind-internal factors is very satisfactory.
Have not analysts and social scientists long talked about
the process of internalization? Is my reading of a text
(book) or indeed my interpretation of an utterance an
internal or an external event? Regarding the problem of
the mother’s brother, it is an error to think that Fortes
contrasted a domestic domain, governed by biology and
natural emotions, with a politico-jural domain. The do-
mestic domain was also characterized by jural rules, and
the family was by no means purely biological; indeed,
as I have said, my own view is that perhaps not enough
weight was given to the latter by him and by many other
social anthropologists. It was not that all “human beings
really reckon kinship bilaterally” or that the sister’s son
is “a true descendent of his mother’s parents” or that
there is “a truly patrilineal system.” These are analytic
concepts, representations, whose truth or reality is pro-
visional, related to notions that are useful rather than
“real.” The world is a more complex matter but one in
which “biology” is involved.
I am intrigued at the attempt to make a link with
Hamilton’s influential notion of kin altruism, which is
not simplistically sociobiological. If Hamilton is right,
there has to be some predisposition in favour of recog-
nizing genealogical relationships, but that seems such a
long way from cultural “kinship” even at the level of
the elementary unit of reproduction—which biologically
has to involve both man and woman and therefore be
bilateral for descendants—that I wonder how much it
helps with the mother’s brother. Bloch and Sperber have,
however, made a most enterprising attempt to seek an
alternative explanation of a widespread but far from uni-
versal phenomenon.
I wonder too about the frame of the argument con-
cerning iconophilic and iconophobic behaviour. It ap-
pears to assume that we find a psychological disposition
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in favour of iconic representations that is suppressed by
certain religious movements. Is there also a psycholog-
ical disposition towards iconoclasm? That would seem
a weak supposition. I am also worried about the notion
of a dominant (patrilineal) norm and its transgression
(especially since this is “a double-descent system”) and
do not see the snatching by the sister’s son (of which I
have seen recurrent examples) in this light. I myself have
argued that the switch between the two attitudes to im-
ages needs to be examined above all at the level of rep-
resentations, a necessary feature of language-using ani-
mals facing the world; these, because they are never the
thing itself but always a facsimile, give rise to ambiva-
lence, doubts, and contradictions. One result is not sim-
ply religiously inspired iconoclasm but also a more
general secular “disposition” to reject images (as para-
digmatically in Plato). Bloch and Sperber take the expla-
nation of the phenomenon to a more “naturalistic” level;
I pitch it at a more “cultural” one, though I do not reject
a psychological underpinning as effect as well as possible
predisposition of a less immediate kind.
edward d. lowe
Center for Culture and Health, Department of
Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Science, University of
California, Los Angeles, 760 Westwood Plaza, C9-752
NPI, Box 951759, Los Angeles, Calif. 90095-1759,
U.S.A. (elowe@ucla.edu). 28 vi 02
How do we study human similarities without dismissing
human differences or human differences without dis-
missing obvious similarities? Bloch and Sperber remind
us, first, that the direction of History has always been
toward greater diversification and complexity, but the
way in which the products of History constrain and allow
the development of other products over time depends on
the level of the history with which one is concerned.
This is because, rather than being independent of one
another, the various levels are “fused” in such a way
that the systemic organization of the products of history
at one level constrains the development of products of
history at other levels (Ford and Lerner 1992). The levels
of History that develop at a slower pace tend to place
greater constraint on the development of faster-devel-
oping levels than the other way around. For example, the
radiation of species always proceeds much more slowly
than the production and diversification of culture, and
the development of culture proceeds much more slowly
than that of any individual human. As a result, the prod-
ucts of genetic history should place powerful constraints
on the products of human social histories, and both
should place powerful constraints on the development
of individuals. The production of culture—the wide-
spread adoption and reproduction of particular forms of
representation—does have some degree of historically
contingent arbitrariness associated with it—partly be-
cause of a genetic capacity for individual agency. But the
arbitrary character of cultural production is limited by
the sedimentary residua of both genetic-historical and
 b l o c h a n d s p e r b e r Kinship and Evolved Psychological Dispositions F 739
social-historical processes. Anthropologists may inves-
tigate human similarities while giving equal considera-
tion to human differences by investigating these twin
processes of diversification and constraint in the flows
of various levels of History.
Given the tendency toward diversification in the pro-
duction of culture, that the norms that govern the re-
lationship of mother’s brother and sister’s son are highly
variable among the societies that have “hypercognized”
(Levy 1984) it is unremarkable. The observation that this
relationship, among all others possible, is recognized and
ritually elaborated in terms of a degree of informality
from younger to older and nurturance from older to
younger in so many historically unrelated patrilineal so-
cieties is remarkable. Some constraint must be operat-
ing, but what is it?
There may indeed be some genetically determined do-
main-specific competence in the human brain/mind that
gives special recognition to people based on their degree
of relatedness to ego. A psychological disposition may
indeed emerge in the development of individuals who
live in patrilineal societies that combines the kin-selec-
tion competence with principles of patriliny in such a
way that social solutions for the obvious disjunctures
between the two attitudes will seem particularly attrac-
tive to them, motivating them to adopt those solutions
and reproduce them over time. But to my knowledge no
evidence of such a domain-specific competence exists,
as Bloch and Sperber admit.
Alternatively, we could dialogue with current neuro-
science and developmental psychology to identify can-
didates for constraint. Two possibilities come to mind:
a domain-specific competence for social categorization
(Hirschfeld 1994) and the capacity for extending the pri-
mary emotional attachments that typically develop be-
tween mother and infant to other exchange partners in
one’s immediate social environment, typically close kin,
and sustaining these attachments throughout life (Lowe
2002). The combination of the two competences could
easily produce the bilateral kin recognition tendencies
that seem central to the case under discussion not
through genetic determination but through the emer-
gence of particular interpersonal relations made more
probable by the interaction of each genetic competence
with the typical social experiences of individuals living
in these societies. If a woman’s attachments to her sib-
lings, particularly her brothers, were sustained when she
married and had children (perhaps through forms of cul-
turally sanctioned occasional exchange), they could eas-
ily be the basis for her directing her children’s attention
to her brother as a source of support, in opposition to
patrilineal principles. Indeed, she might encourage the
recognition of the relationships between her son and her
brother as an alternative source of support to the child’s
own lineage mates. Her brother might also feel partic-
ularly sympathetic with his sister’s (likely) precarious
position in her husband’s household, where she might
never gain full acceptance. Sibling attachment and the
insecurity associated with living among affines (partly
resulting from being a different kind of social person)
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could easily produce the kind of psychological disposi-
tion that would make ritualized snatching and related
informal joking behaviors in the mother’s brother/sis-
ter’s son relationship particularly “catchy.”
joseph poulshock
Language Evolution and Computation Unit,
Department of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics,
University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, Scotland, U.K.
(josephpoulshock@mac.com). 3 vii 02
Bloch and Sperber’s article is a welcome attempt at an
approach to an understanding of cultural phenomena by
means and mechanisms grounded in natural or material
properties. It is welcome because it attempts to trace our
understanding of cultural experience to empirical and
real causes as opposed to logically coherent argumen-
tation and speculation based on diverse biological and
cultural facts which relate to explicanda but cannot be
confidently traced to putative causes in our explicans.
Moreover, although Bloch and Sperber disassociate their
method from a memetic approach to culture, in many
ways it is like memetics—or an improvement on me-
metics. They differ from the main memeticists by claim-
ing to expect a continuum of cultural representations
from idiosyncratic to broadly cultural—as opposed to
Dawkins’s (1976) and Blackmore’s (1999) memetic di-
chotomy between true replicators and other mental
events. However, their epidemiology of representations
is still memetic in that it fits into the meme-as-germ
school of thought (Lynch 1996) rather than the meme-
as-gene school (Blackmore 1999). Moreover, their ap-
proach, like memetics, is a naturalistic and Darwinian
way of explaining and comprehending culture that, while
avoiding the meme-gene analogy and the focus on re-
plicators, still attempts to explain culture as an epide-
miology of representations. Memetics is rife with em-
pirical and conceptual difficulties and has yet to provide
any tangible results (Aunger 2001). Bloch and Sperber’s
approach, however, with its emphasis on a mechanism
for representational transmission, holds out the promise
of putting tread on the tires of memetic-like research.
Their modest claim that a biological predisposition
such as an engendered sensitivity toward kinship infor-
mation stabilizes cultural representations of a similar
kind is suggestive and interesting. Moreover, the idea
that a psychological predilection rebels ritualistically
against an internalized norm and yet affirms that norm
by contrasting with it is an intriguing and counterin-
tuitive conclusion. Nevertheless, though evocative, such
an assertion does not provide us with any real empirical
insight into this cultural trait. Moreover, and more se-
rious, this is probably because of problems with the ap-
proach. Bloch and Sperber claim that their method “aims
at describing and explaining cultural phenomena in
terms of processes and mechanisms the causal powers
of which are wholly grounded in their natural (or ‘ma-
terial’) properties.” However, their mechanism is seri-
ously underdefined. Human agents who make up cul-
740 F c u r r e n t a n t h ro p o l o g y Volume 43, Number 5, December 2002
tures possess bio-psychological predispositions that
support cultural norms. But what exactly is the mech-
anism that curses some cultural representations to sta-
bilize? Can we see this mechanism in action? Moreover,
are we absolutely sure that the putative predispositions
in question exist? For example, are there ways to test for
a human psychological tendency to look for information
relevant to kinship ties? In addition, does our current
understanding of the way in which we gather kinship
information belong to the realm of fact, truism, or as-
sumption? Lastly, can we trace cultural representations
to causes empirically, or are we going to accept infer-
ences based on assorted facts and assumptions combined
with careful speculation?
Besides these problems, there appears to be an even
more basic issue at the root of Bloch and Sperber’s ap-
proach. The informational norms at the center of their
research question do not seem not to fit easily into mech-
anistic categories. Human agents create cultural repre-
sentations, and while there may be biological predispo-
sitions for much of culture, I wonder whether we can
reduce such creative acts to mechanisms. Perhaps there
is a rigorous way to approach culture in the terms that
Bloch and Sperber suggest that will produce knowledge
about the stabilization of cultural representations, but
at this point, though their effort is a worthy one, their
results appear still somewhat immaterial.
p e t e r j . r i c h e r s o n a n d ro b e r t b o y d
Department of Environmental Science and Policy,
University of California, Davis, Calif. 95616, U.S.A.
(pjricherson@ucdavis.edu). 9 iv 02
Bloch and Sperber’s portrayal of the interaction between
cultural and genetic evolution is mainly correct. Here
we briefly situate their proposal in the history of the field
of gene-culture coevolution.
Darwin’s (1874) theory of human evolution was re-
markably modern (Richerson and Boyd 2001a). Darwin
was not a racist. He believed that culture and environ-
ment explained virtually all differences between living
human populations except those caused by sexual selec-
tion. However, his ideas were incomplete in two crucial,
related respects. He thought that culture and organic in-
heritance were integrated via the concept of inherited
habits and, as a consequence, did not clearly articulate
a relationship between the evolution of psychological
rules and the subsequent evolution of cultural traditions,
heritable habits, and other forms of inheritance of ac-
quired variation. Despite these problems, he gave ex-
amples that accord closely with Bloch and Sperber’s pro-
posal. For example, he thought that selection between
tribes had given rise in “primeval” times to specific, now
universal ethical intuitions such as sympathy and loy-
alty and that these “instincts” have guided the evolution
of ethical systems ever since (Richards 1987). Like Bloch
and Sperber, he was quite clear that such instincts do
not rigidly determine what culture traditions evolve or
behaviors occur. For example, he knew that the moral
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crimes of Europeans, such as slavery and colonial gen-
ocide, existed despite the instinct of sympathy that mo-
tivated his own passionate opposition to such practices.
Darwin’s ideas significantly influenced the develop-
ment of psychology until the end of the 19th century
(Richards 1987). James Baldwin’s (1895) views were par-
ticularly sophisticated. As early as 1895, five years before
the rediscovery of Mendel, Baldwin drew a sharp dis-
tinction between the “machinery of heredity” and imi-
tation and hence drew the distinction we now make be-
tween culture and genes. Nevertheless, Darwin’s and his
followers’ influence on the emerging social and behav-
ioral sciences was narrow (Bowler 1988) and eventually
disappeared.
Donald Campbell’s (e.g., 1965) work began a late-20th-
century revival of interest in the relationship between
genetic and cultural processes. Campbell was inspired
not directly by Darwin or Baldwin but by what he called
the “blind variation and selective retention” analogy be-
tween natural selection on genes and mental selection
of variant behaviors essayed by individuals during learn-
ing. He argued that the analogy applied very broadly
across knowledge systems, including cultural systems.
He also reasoned that selection would favor what he
called “internal selective criteria that are vicarious rep-
resentatives of external selectors,” especially natural se-
lection. Specifically, evolution would have built human
brains with vicarious selectors to manage culture. The
parallel with Bloch and Sperber’s argument is close, if
not exact.
In 1973, Luca Cavalli-Sforza and Marcus Feldman in-
troduced the idea of using the formal analogies between
genes and culture to motivate the borrowing of models
from population genetics for the study of cultural evo-
lution. They also noted the analogy of culture to epi-
demic contagions (Cavalli-Sforza and Feldman 1981:
46–53). These models are powerful tools for deducing the
macro-level consequences of micro-scale processes, a
problem that Bloch and Sperber correctly note is central
to understanding evolution.
Our own efforts along these lines (e.g., Boyd and Rich-
erson 1985, Henrich and Boyd 1998) have been mainly
directed at elucidating the mental mechanisms that in-
dividuals use to manage the flow of cultural information
and deducing the macro-level consequences of such
mechanisms. For example, we have shown that the use
of a conformist rule in converting public to mental rep-
resentations is adaptive under a surprisingly wide variety
of circumstances. Selection very likely built such rules
into the innate structure of our minds. One macro-level
consequence of conformity is that it makes group selec-
tion on cultural variation easy compared with group se-
lection on genes. Darwin’s proposal that between-tribe
selection resulted in the evolution of sympathy and loy-
alty is plausible if we suppose that first cultural insti-
tutions evolved enjoining sympathy and loyalty and then
the innate instinct coevolved in response. In this sce-
nario, violators of cultural rules experienced fitness-re-
ducing punishment by those innately better prepared to
follow them. This potential inversion of the evolutionary
 b l o c h a n d s p e r b e r Kinship and Evolved Psychological Dispositions F 741
causal order generally assumed by sociobiologists (e.g.,
Lumsden and Wilson 1981) was noted by Baldwin and is
often called the “Baldwin effect.” The hypothesized
mental products of cultural group selection and related
processes do seem to exist and to account well for the
unique patterns of human sociality (e.g., Richerson and
Boyd 2001b). The models also suggest several mecha-
nisms by which historical contingency arises in cultural
evolution (Boyd and Richerson 1992), underlining the
explanatory modesty noted by Bloch and Sperber.
We believe that Darwinian methods can be applied to
the analysis of culture and its psychological foundations
along the lines indicated by Bloch and Sperber. We also
believe that there already has been enough progress in
this enterprise for it to make serious claims to anthro-
pologists’ attention.
christina toren
Department of Human Sciences, Brunel University,
Uxbridge, Middlesex UB8 3PH, U.K. (christina.toren@
brunel.ac.uk). 4 vii 02
Perhaps the most profound observation to be derived
from the corpus of ethnography is that the peopled world
provides for all our historically constituted descriptions
of it, rendering these always partial descriptions objec-
tive in different ways. Difficult though it is to credit that
other people’s ideas are as objectively warranted by the
world as one’s own, it is only to the extent that one does
so that, as an anthropologist, one recognizes the neces-
sity for a theory of human being that is capable of ex-
plaining how this comes to be so. It is important there-
fore to attempt anthropologically valid explanations,
explanations that seek to render analytical the concepts
people use to describe and/or account for their own ideas
and practices, especially where, as here, we are asked to
accept that a series of conjectures derived from socio-
biology and evolutionary psychology illuminates “the
significance of the relationship between the mother’s
brother and sister’s son in patrilineal societies.”
Elsewhere I have argued for a model of human being
that recognizes that mind is a function of the whole
person in intersubjective relations with others (see Toren
1999a). I have proposed that each of us makes sense of
the world by making meaning out of meanings that oth-
ers have made and are making—a process in which
knowledge is transformed in the very process of being
maintained. The development of mind over time is thus
an aspect of physical development in which mental
structures are continually differentiated through func-
tioning to assimilate additional experience. But because
we are biologically social creatures, our understanding
of the world is always mediated by relations with others.
Thus language acquisition is crucial to the form our un-
derstanding takes. Even so, we do not, in learning to
speak, simply take on other people’s meanings; rather,
we constitute anew the concepts and grammar of the
language by which we are surrounded and, in so doing,
at once maintain and subtly transform that language.
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Our descriptions of the world and ourselves are the ar-
tefact of the embodied microhistory that makes each one
of us what we are. The effectiveness of scientific expla-
nations and the technologies to which they give rise is
a function of their validity, but neither the explanations
nor the technologies are immune from history.
This model shows how we come to be certain that the
world conforms to our particular ideas of it even while
we may know that others are just as certain of their own.
It follows that to understand human ontogeny is to un-
derstand how mind as the fundamental historical phe-
nomenon imagines the world that warrants its imagi-
nation. Because the model shows how ideas are
transformed in the self-same process in which they are
maintained, it is capable of explaining how we come to
be so similar in the ways we differ and so different in
the ways we are the same. And because it has no recourse
to distinctions between biology and culture, evolution
and history, it enables us to avoid the sterile debate con-
cerning what is “in the genes” and what is “transmitted
through the environment.”
My holding that anthropological explanations should
be consistent with what we know about biology does not
entail that I accept the entirety of Dawkins’s model, for
I am more convinced by Gould’s (see Sterelny 2001). I
am also concerned that anthropological practice be sci-
entific, but this does not entail that I accept the idea of
“evolved psychological predispositions” that Bloch and
Sperber take for granted. The implication of my argu-
ment is that the idea of psychological predispositions as
formulated in evolutionary psychology (see Tooby and
Cosmides 1992:92–93) is unnecessary, that an epidemi-
ology of representations has no explanatory value, and
that, from an anthropological perspective, both ideas are
unscientific (see Toren 2002).
The strength of anthropological analysis is its ability
to embrace complexity. Thus Lévi-Strauss’s (1978[1973])
analysis of “the atom of kinship” that is constituted in
the relations between brother, sister, father, and son
shows how it allows for a relation of consanguinity, af-
finity, and filiation and how, further, relations between
men and women in the senior generation stand in cor-
relative opposition to relations between men across gen-
erations (1977[1963]:46). In Fiji (where I do my fieldwork)
this should mean that reserve between brother and sister
is opposed to familiarity between husband and wife as
reserve between father and son is opposed to familiarity
between mother’s brother and sister’s son, but this set
of oppositions does not, in fact, exist. Nevertheless,
when we take the point of view of a male ego, at any
given point in his life Lévi-Strauss’s thesis holds; the
father’s sternness to the child contrasts with the playful
familiarity of the mother’s brother, while a progressive
relaxation in the relation between father and son over
time contrasts with increasing avoidance between
mother’s brother and sister’s son. The relation between
a male ego and his father’s sisters undergoes a somewhat
less pronounced change in contradistinction to the re-
lation between him and his mother (Toren 1999b; cf.
Lévi-Strauss’s discussion of how, for the Lele, the system
742 F c u r r e n t a n t h ro p o l o g y Volume 43, Number 5, December 2002
of relations in the atom of kinship changes as a function
of “succeeding phases of individual life” [1978(1973):
100].) “The avunculate” emerges as an artifact of the
analyst’s focus on just one of the variety of structurally
logical possibilities presented by the atom of kinship
(Lévi-Strauss 1978[1973]:100), and it entails an idea of
unilineal descent that is arguably an anthropological il-
lusion (see Kuper 1988:190–209).
Selection may indeed work primarily by selecting lin-
eages of genes according to their differing capacities for
replication (Dawkins 1982), but the matter is by no
means decided even among evolutionary biologists. Even
if, however, we accept this thesis and, further, accept kin
altruism and its entailment of “an instinctually based
universal bilateral recognition of kinship,” this serves
only to lead us back to Lévi-Strauss’s atom of kinship.
Reply
maurice bloch and dan sperber
Paris, France. 27 viii 02
The central purpose of our paper was to outline the kind
of theory which took account of and understood the prob-
lems older comparative and generalizing projects in so-
cial and cultural anthropology have run into. Thirty
years ago or so, most social and cultural anthropologists
were still involved in systematically documenting the
variety of human cultures and institutions and trying to
explain them. However, the comparative and general-
izing projects of old ran into serious problems. Today,
most anthropologists are critical if not downright con-
temptuous of these goals, as if they were unattainable
and in any case unattractive. They are even more hostile
to the various biologically inspired, theoretically ambi-
tious approaches to culture that have recently flourished.
Often, it is true, proponents of these approaches
—sociobiology and memetics in particular—have shown
little or no interest in standard anthropological evidence
and issues, as if the knowledge and competence that had
accumulated were so defective that the field had better
be reinvented from scratch. They have rarely understood
the problems of the comparative enterprise, especially
in the study of kinship. Our approach, by contrast, takes
into account recent criticisms of classical theorizing
while also drawing on evolutionary thinking in ways
that we hoped might be unobjectionable and even ap-
pealing to social/cultural anthropologists, at least to
those who have not altogether given up on the original
theoretical goals of the discipline.
The commentators well understand and in most cases
approve of our goal of reestablishing fruitful communi-
cation between those on the “biological side” and those
on the “culturalist side.” However, with a couple of ex-
ceptions, only the former seemed to have been suffi-
ciently interested in our argument to offer comments.
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This silence from the culturalist side is not to be inter-
preted as tacit approval.
Our aims were several and went beyond just improving
scientific communication. We wanted to develop a the-
ory which could account for cultural recurrences such
as the special relation of mother’s brother to sister’s son
in certain societies that had fascinated earlier anthro-
pologists, and we wanted to do so without exaggerating
their commonness or their uniformity. To this end we
wanted to explain, defend, and illustrate an “epidemi-
ology of representations,” a theory that differs from clas-
sical anthropological approaches and recent biological
approaches to culture in various ways, in particular in
the central role it assigns to cognition. We feel that the
specificity of our approach is not always fully recognized
or discussed by the commentators, with the exception
of Borgerhoff Mulder (who in some ways explains our
enterprise better than we did ourselves).
We discuss the general theoretical issues raised by the
commentators in the first part of this response. In the
second part, we discuss kinship issues.
Anthropological theory. Richerson and Boyd usefully
place our attempt in the context of earlier cognate work.
Indeed, they, as well as Boster and Borgerhoff Mulder,
justly hint that we should have drawn more attention
to attempts similar to ours. Had we done so, however,
we would not have told quite the same story as our com-
mentators. The idea of viewing culture as an epidemi-
ological phenomenon of course did not originate with us
or even with Cavalli-Sforza and Feldman (1981). It is
much older: it was, for instance, developed more than a
century ago by Gabriel Tarde in sociology (Tarde 1985)
and by diffusionists in anthropology. This idea is quite
broad in any case. An epidemiological phenomenon is a
distribution of conditions (such as diseases, accidents, or
addictions) in a population. An epidemiological approach
to a phenomenon such as culture consists in viewing it
as a historically evolving distribution of habits, practices,
beliefs, and so on, and trying to identify and explain pat-
terns in this distribution. In contrast to holism, epide-
miological approaches look for explanations of macro-
phenomena in microprocesses, and in contrast to
methodological individualism, they do not privilege in-
dividual rational choices and actions as explanatory mi-
croprocesses (Boster sees this last point as a weakness
and prefers a more individualistic approach). In a broad
sense, all recent evolutionary approaches to culture are
“epidemiological.”
When, however, Cavalli-Sforza and Feldman (1981),
Dawkins (1993), Lynch (1996), and others use the epi-
demiological idiom, they have something much more
specific in mind, namely, the epidemiology of infectious,
typically bacterial or viral, diseases. They see cultural
items as spreading, as do viruses or bacteria, through a
copying process, with novelty resulting from mutations
(which, in the cultural case, may sometimes be intended
rather than random). Infectious diseases, however, are
only one kind of epidemiological phenomenon. Addic-
tions are another common kind and arguably one more
relevant to the study of culture than infectious diseases.
 b l o c h a n d s p e r b e r Kinship and Evolved Psychological Dispositions F 743
The epidemiology of representations that we are de-
fending was first put forward in Sperber (1985b) and has
since been elaborated and illustrated in a number of
works (e.g., Atran 1998; Atran and Sperber 1991; Boyer
1994, 2001; Hirschfeld 1996; Norenzayan and Atran n.d.,
Sperber 1996). It differs from the works we have just
mentioned in that it takes the idea of epidemiology in
its broad sense and makes the processes of human cog-
nition central. Therefore, contrary to what Poulshock
suggests, our approach does not fit into the meme-as-
germ school of thought. It is not a memetic approach at
all. We hope that this clarifies our use of the term “ep-
idemiology” (to which Borgerhoff Mulder objects be-
cause of the link she sees with memetics) and answers
Brown’s question “How is an expression like ‘epidemi-
ology of representations’ different from or preferable to
‘memes’?”
The epidemiology of representations denies that most
or even much of culture is to be explained by processes
of selection among competing genelike or germlike re-
plicators (or “memes”). It insists that different kind of
processes and factors are involved in the distribution of
different types of cultural phenomena. It stresses, among
many other things, the causal role of biologically evolved
domain-specific psychological dispositions and suscep-
tibilities in the stabilization of cultural representations
and practices. In this sense, it fits better with the program
of evolutionary psychology as formulated by Tooby and
Cosmides (1992) than with less psychologically rich ev-
olutionary approaches, be they memetic or sociobio-
logical (but see below for some differences with Tooby
and Cosmides).
One of the best ways of identifying what we are not
saying and how our approach differs from memetics is
returning to Boster’s charge that we attribute “agency”
to representations and “passivity” to humans. This may
be a valid criticism of the meme idea, but it certainly is
not of ours. For us, representations do not have agency.
They are more or less successfully transmitted from one
person’s mind to another’s because of the way minds
work. The receptivity of individual minds to different
contents is determined by a variety of factors, in partic-
ular evolved psychological dispositions. When, say, in-
dividuals come to believe what they have been told, it
is not a case of their minds’ being passively invaded by
an active idea. Rather, what happens in them is a com-
plex inferential process of comprehension and accep-
tance. This process results in the construction of a men-
tal representation influenced by that of another person
through the production and perception of a mind-exter-
nal public representation. This public representation
does not have intrinsic meaning, let alone agency; it has
only the meaning attributed to it by its producer and
comprehenders. Where we may differ from Boster is that
he seems to favor a Homo economicus model of the
human agent whereas we appeal to a model which takes
into account the richness of human cognition and
emotion.
Goody is not sure that the dichotomy of mind-internal
and mind-external factors is very satisfactory: “Have not
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analysts and social scientists long talked about the pro-
cess of internalization? Is my reading of a text (book) or
indeed my interpretation of an utterance an internal or
an external event?” We would argue that the metaphor
of “internalization” has done more harm than good. To
see this, think of a case in which internalization occurs
in a literal sense, for instance, when you insert a diskette
in a computer. Public representations, utterances, and
books do not literally enter our minds. Rather, they stim-
ulate our auditory or visual nerve endings. These nerves
do not serve to “internalize” anything. They provide in-
put to complex cognitive processes that construct rather
than take in mental representations. The internalization
metaphor has been successful in the social sciences, we
suggest, because it helps keep the psychological mech-
anisms and processes involved in cultural transmission
vague.
One of our problems with meme theory (see also Bloch
2000 and Sperber 2000) is that it seems to reproduce,
within a naturalist framework, something like the old
ontological contrast between nature and culture which
so encumbers Calderón’s comments. The elimination of
this contrast, both Borgerhoff Mulder and Brown recog-
nize, was one of our goals. We want to insist that culture
is always natural. Meme theory suggests that, with the
coming of the “mind invaders” (Dennett 1995), a dis-
continuous and radical shift occurs in primate evolu-
tion—so radical a shift, indeed, that it can look very
much like the folk notion of the “passage from nature
to culture.”
Unlike memeticists, for whom the evolution of me-
mes is radically distinct from that of genes, we are among
those who assume that biologically evolved psycholog-
ical dispositions not only make culture possible but also
play some causal role in the stabilization of specific cul-
tural contents. Richerson and Boyd go a step farther and
see our proposal as based on the idea of gene-culture
coevolution (to the development of which they have so
much contributed). We recognize the importance of this
idea and of Baldwin’s discovery of the effect that is now
named for him. We are willing to pay homage to Donald
Campbell in the matter (although we fail to see the par-
allel between his and our arguments). However, we
hardly made use of the idea of coevolution in this paper.
We assumed an evolved disposition to look for evidence
of relatedness and to favor related individuals. We re-
flected on the causal role that such a disposition could
play in the stabilization of specific cultural practices.
Given the different rates of biological and cultural evo-
lution stressed by Lowe in his commentary, it is gen-
erally much easier to see how biologically evolved dis-
positions might have influenced cultural practices than
the other way around. Still, it is possible that the dis-
position in question might itself have evolved in reaction
to culture, yielding a true case of coevolution. We would
welcome suggestions to that effect, but we ourselves did
not have any to make. Therefore, when Richerson and
Boyd praise us for, in substance, following a well-trodden
path, we deserve neither the compliment nor the gently
implied criticism.
744 F c u r r e n t a n t h ro p o l o g y Volume 43, Number 5, December 2002
The main theoretical point of our paper was to sketch
and illustrate an original way of articulating evolved dis-
positions and cultural features. To explain its originality
in a different way than we did in the article, let us dis-
tinguish four current positions on the nature of culture
and explain how ours differs from all four. A first position
is shared by traditional anthropologists and memeticists.
They converge in assuming that the role of evolved
dispositions in culture is hardly more than to make cul-
ture possible. A second, diametrically opposite position,
which today no one holds, would be to assume that genes
rigidly determine cultural representations. Rather, a
third position is dominant among sociobiologists and be-
havioral ecologists, and it is that (to quote Boster) “hu-
mans are genetically similar but phenotypically (and cul-
turally) diverse: The same genotype is facultatively
expressed as different behavioral phenotypes depending
on signals from the environment.” (A “facultative phe-
notypic expression of genes”—degree of sun tanning, for
instance—is one of several possible expressions that is
coded by the genes and depends for its occurrence on
local factors.) Tooby and Cosmides (1992) hold an orig-
inal fourth position that combines elements from the
first and third ones. They distinguish “evoked culture,”
that is, locally occurring behaviors that are facultative
phenotypic expressions of genes, and “transmitted cul-
ture,” that is, behaviors that are caused by social and, in
particular, intergenerational transmission, and assume
that both sorts of culture exist.
We disagree with all these positions. In contrast to
traditional anthropologists and memeticists, we hold
that evolved psychological dispositions play a role in
shaping cultural contents. In contrast to sociobiologists
and behavioral ecologists, we do not believe that cultural
representations and practices are phenotypic expressions
of genes, even facultative ones. In contrast to Tooby and
Cosmides, we reject the distinction between evoked and
transmitted culture. Rather, we hold that there is a con-
tinuum of cases between cultural items that are strongly
shaped by evolved dispositions and others that are
weakly shaped. All of culture is partly evoked and partly
transmitted, in different proportions.
Now, how might evolved dispositions and transmis-
sion processes interact in generating culture? It may be
easier, in answering this question, to start with the ex-
ample of a cultural artifact. It would make little sense
to say that a hamburger is a phenotypic expression of
genes. It is very much a historical collective product and
not a response of individual organisms to the environ-
ment. At the same time, it is obvious that a hamburger
provides a combination of glucids, protids, and lipids and
a texture that meet evolved human food preferences par-
ticularly well. A culturalist would point out that ham-
burgers are not popular in all cultures and that food pref-
erences are themselves culturally shaped, which is true
but only to a certain extent (no culture, for instance, has
given up on any of the three basic kinds of ingredients).
However, the cultural shaping of taste is not fully
achieved until adulthood. In modern societies, in partic-
ular the U.S.A., children can to a large extent impose
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their food preferences, and industrial interests influence
the acceptability of foods more than, say, religious con-
cerns. These factors combine to give relatively untutored
tastes a strong influence on the success of a foodstuff.
In such societies, if a foodstuff like the hamburger is on
offer at all, it stands a good chance of reaching a very
high level of distribution. Cultural representations and
practices are like cultural artifacts. They are not coded,
even as facultative expressions, by the genes. They are
not phenotypes. They are historical products of collect-
ivities.
Some of the commentators express theoretical pref-
erences or concerns different from ours but offer opinions
rather than arguments to which we could try to respond.
Brown criticizes us for not acknowledging “affinities to
the growing bodies of work on complexity, emergent
structures, and self-organizing systems.” The body of
work he is referring to and the more standard cognitive
approach that we adopt have common origins in the the-
ory of automata and that of information of the ’30s and
’40s, but otherwise the affinities are rather weak. Unlike
Brown, we are not convinced that complexity theory is
the way to go (nor are we hostile, for that matter). Poul-
shock worries that our informational-representational
perspective on culture does not fit well with the mech-
anistic view that we also adopt. Here, however, we are
just in agreement again with the standard cognitive ap-
proach, which aims to be both representational and
mechanistic. Toren (with whose very general remarks
we would otherwise have little difficulty in finding
points of agreement) flatly asserts that an epidemiology
of representations has “no explanatory value” and is “un-
scientific.” She praises Lévi-Strauss’s work based on the
assumption of a universal human drive to structure cul-
tural information in a particular way, a drive which he
no doubt considered the product of human evolution,
and then tells us that she does not believe in evolved
psychological predispositions—a remark which, taken
literally, would make her a rare creationist contributor
to current anthropology.
Several contributors complain about the vague and
tentative character of our proposals. Calderón, for in-
stance, finds our theoretical claims “vague and unhelp-
ful.” Poulshock asks, “Are we absolutely sure that the
putative predispositions in question exist? For example,
are there ways to test for a human psychological ten-
dency to look for information relevant to kinship ties?”
The answer to his first question is of course no. There
are no absolute certainties in the empirical sciences. The
answer to his second question is that this is an ordinary
psychological issue quite similar to others that have been
experimentally studied. We can understand the frustra-
tion with our enterprise of scientists seeking relatively
simple causal explanations in strictly controlled exper-
imental situations. Although the epidemiological ap-
proach to culture has benefited from experimental work,
it also needs the vaguer but much richer evidence pro-
vided by anthropological fieldwork. We are, after all, try-
ing to contribute to anthropology, not to displace it.
Kinship. In this article, we used the example of the
 b l o c h a n d s p e r b e r Kinship and Evolved Psychological Dispositions F 745
mother’s brother/sister’s son relationship merely as an
illustration of our theoretical project. Apart from Boster,
who complains that we “present neither new data nor a
complete reanalysis of the existing data,” the commen-
tators understand this. We argued that “classical” an-
thropologists, Goody in particular, had been generally
right in their analysis. Brown and Boster are clearly dis-
appointed by this lack of radical novelty, but in fact it
precisely suited our purpose of showing that classical
anthropological concerns, contrary to what most an-
thropologists of today think, could be fruitfully ad-
dressed by adopting a naturalistic perspective.
Boster, whose commentary combines very interesting
suggestions of his own with repeated misunderstandings
of ours, asserts that the “principal proposal of this paper
[is] that humans have ‘an evolved disposition to favor
relatives.’ ” Not only was this claim not our principal
proposal but we even refrained from making it. The
claim is indeed uncontroversial on the biological side
and at the same time unacceptable in principle on the
cultural side. We, for our part, see it as highly plausible
(and Boster explains well why it is so), but rather than
try to persuade our more culturalist readers to accept it
we wanted them just to entertain it and see that it had
plausible and interesting consequences. Lowe, though
willing to entertain the claim, prefers an original com-
bination of Hirschfeld’s domain-specific competence for
social categorization with a disposition to extend sen-
timents toward the mother to other relatives. A similar
extension-of-sentiments thesis has been refuted by
Needham (1962), who pointed out that things that we
do willingly do not normally need to be backed up by
socially organized sanctions. The problem that we tried
to address and that Lowe does not deal with is how in-
dividual dispositions might play a causal role in the
emergence and persistence of institutions, given that we
are dealing with institutionalized rules of behavior.
More generally, the area of kinship illustrates partic-
ularly well both the necessity and the difficulty of ar-
ticulating the biological and the cultural points of view
(a concern at the center of Calderón’s comments). The
biological notion of kinship is a relatively clear one, and
it applies to humans as to other animals. The question
of how biological kinship is being managed by human
societies obviously arises, and it may have seemed un-
problematic that this is done by social institutions of
“kinship” in a now anthropological sense of the term.
Classical anthropologists did not mistake social insti-
tutions for biological phenomena (and if we gave the
impression that we thought they did, Goody is right to
correct us), but they took for granted a relatively clear
relationship between the two. Such writers as Goody
himself, Fortes, and Lévi-Strauss (who, according to To-
ren, said the last word on explaining the recurrence of
the special relationship of sister’s son to mother’s brother
in patrilineal societies) did not think that kinship sys-
tems simply reflected biological closeness but assumed
that “kinship” was always the same isolable kind of phe-
nomenon, although which links were given social sig-
nificance varied.
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We believe that the critiques of Leach, Needham, and
Schneider have shown how fundamental the various phe-
nomena labeled “kinship” really are. What in the past
have been taken to be straightforwardly comparable in-
stitutions have revealed themselves not to be so. Kinship
itself is not a type of social relation but a very loose
family (see Carsten 2000). “Kinship types” which have
been labeled by terms such as “patriliny” turn out to
identify very little, and it is this realization which, as
we said in the paper, has been the major cause of the
abandonment of the comparative programme in social
anthropology. Just how radical this problem has been has
not always fully sunk in, and we would argue that this
is the case for such authors as Irons, although praised by
Borgerhoff Mulder. Given how muddled the issue re-
mained for a long time in social/cultural anthropology,
it is not surprising that many writers on the biological
side have not grasped the problem.
Boster’s confident assertion that a correlation could be
demonstrated between paternity doubts and institution-
alized privileges of sister’s son illustrates the issue (and
is precisely the kind of assertion which, for good or bad
reasons, makes most social/cultural anthropologists
cringe). Quite apart from the difficulty of measuring “pa-
ternity doubts,” the problem is that “institutionalized
privileges” are, as we point out, of totally different kinds
in the different examples and the term “sister’s son” can
refer to quite different persons. For example, “sister’s
son” would in some cases be own sister’s son, in others
any child of a woman of ego’s descent group. Given this
state of affairs, it is not clear what is supposed to cor-
relate with what and what would be the significance of
such a correlation were it to be established.
The history of anthropology is littered with such quix-
otic attempts. This is why we propose an approach that
neither takes for granted nor needs a taxonomy of so-
ciocultural macrophenomena as its starting point. Cul-
tural forms are extremely varied and labile, and, in spite
of the illusion created by traditional anthropological ter-
minology, they do not fall into discrete classes. They are
just ever-changing patterns in the history of social in-
teraction. To consider the cultural variability revealed
by the ethnographic record the product of history is not
to state that it is random. There is, for us, an explanatory
level, and it is that of the microprocesses that shape these
changing sociocultural patterns and of the diverse factors
that favor or impede specific microprocesses. Like med-
ical epidemiologists with diseases, we do not expect, in
general, to be able to fulfill Poulshock’s request to “see
in action” the mechanism by means of which some cul-
tural representation or practice stabilizes. Micro-
mechanisms can be anecdotally documented and, in
some cases, experimentally studied. To understand their
causal role in a formally appropriate way would involve
modeling their cumulative effect in specified conditions
and matching the model to anthropological observations
of macrophenomena. At present, formal tools may be
available (for instance, in the work of Boyd and Rich-
erson), but what is sorely lacking is sufficient knowledge
of micromechanisms and macroanthropological descrip-
746 F c u r r e n t a n t h ro p o l o g y Volume 43, Number 5, December 2002
tions that are hostage neither to obsolete ontologies nor
to antiscientific ideologies.
In the particular case of kinship, to say that there is
no distinct and universal type of social institution which
has as its function to manage biological kinship does not
at all imply that biological kinship and sociocultural in-
stitutions are wholly unrelated. As we suggested with
the minor but, we hoped, illustrative case of the mother’s
brother/sister’s son, there may be evolved psychological
dispositions to attend to evidence of biological related-
ness and take it into account in one’s thoughts, emo-
tions, and behavior. These (together with other factors
which may or may not be linked to biological kinship
and may be more or less specific to time and place) favor,
in the long term, the emergence and stabilization of rep-
resentations, terminologies, practices, and institutions
with particular contents. They do not, however, deter-
mine a discrete type of cultural form.
Conclusion. With the exception of Goody, whose work
on this topic antedates the attitude we criticize, and To-
ren, all the social and cultural anthropologists who were
approached for comments, even those who are experts
in kinship, declined to do so. We are thus left with only
the possibility of commenting on their silence. There
seems to be a kind of holy horror among most cultural
and social anthropologists concerning any suggestion
that a genetic element might contribute to explaining
anything of anthropological significance. This is espe-
cially striking in the area of kinship, given its importance
both from a cultural and from a biological point of view.
This horror is explained in part by the connection which
“biological” approaches have too often had with various
types of racism and also by the frequent and fundamental
misunderstanding of the complexity of cultural data and
the significance of history in human cultural systems on
the part of many of those who have taken such ap-
proaches. However, it is not as if all biological ap-
proaches were so guilty. Richerson and Boyd justly point
out the modernity of Darwin’s own positions in this re-
spect. Therefore, the antibiological stance of much cur-
rent anthropology is not fully explained by a mere excess
of moral and intellectual concern. Plain disciplinary pa-
rochialism and conservatism obviously play their part,
perhaps made all the worse by the bizarre institutional
structures of anthropology departments. In any case,
there is nothing in our article or in our work which could
even remotely justify a suspicion of ideological misuse
of biology. Moreover, far from ignoring the complexity
of historical-cultural data, one of our main purposes was
to explore how biological considerations could play a
part in explaining it. The silence of social and cultural
anthropologists in this debate illustrates the fact that so
many of them no longer want to engage with the fun-
damental questions concerned with the explanation of
variability and uniformity in human populations except
to express occasional supercilious annoyance at the naı̈v-
ety of those who do. Yet, it is surely this attitude that
makes ordinary people—who naturally, as do all of us,
want the best possible scientific understanding of human
nature and history—turn to scholars who share this goal
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but may not have benefited from the accumulated ex-
perience and disappointments of the discipline. No one,
whether anthropologist, biologist, or interested reader,
stands to benefit from this refusal of anthropologists to
engage in the debate.
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